So from this day forth (or, rather, from a couple of weeks ago when we quietly launched the new site) you’ll be able to find all our latest stories, columns and photo essays at www.disposablewords.net. RSS users can find the new feed at http://disposablewords.net/?feed=rss2 and for those of our readers who are especially social media-inclined you might consider following us on Twitter at @disposable140

This address will remain accessible as the storage value for four years of old stories and photo reportage but will be closed to new posts for the foreseeable future. Don’t cough on any mothballs if you do decide to poke around and I hope to see everyone on the other side of the wall!

No related posts.

But over the course of the weekend, as I tracked tweets, I came across a reaction to this unfathomable event that was quite dismaying. The global trending topic list at this time included “Pearl Harbour”. It would seem that there were those among the human race whose first reaction was to conclude that the devastation and loss of thousands of lives as a result of the natural disaster was no more than karmic retribution. Apparently it had all been spurred on by a supposedly jocular tweet by Family Guy scriptwriter Alec Sulkin, who wrote: “If you wanna feel better about this earthquake in Japan, google ‘Pearl Harbor death toll,’” with reference to imperial Japan’s sneak attack on US forces in Hawaii in 1941. I chose not to provide my own retort on Twitter because, as is the inherent nature of the SEO based virtual world we live in, it would only serve to perpetuate the ignorance.

However, such comments really are an indication of how little we understand of the extent to which our contemporary states have become irrevocably interconnected on a global scale. Japan now has to contend with a nuclear crisis that threatens to cause a widespread meltdown that has been described by some to be on the scale of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union. Following the Japanese quake, reports confirmed an explosion inside the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on Saturday morning and the country’s experts are still struggling to keep the reactor fuel cool enough to prevent a further explosion.  Consider, too, that in the case of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident, four hundred times more radioactive material is said to have been released than had been by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II.

Add to that the implications of this on the global economy which according to a CNN business report is still “reeling from the staggering human and economic toll from Japan’s 9.0-measure earthquake. [...] The Japanese nuclear plant that exploded is equipped with reactors designed by Dow component General Electric. Its shares fell 2.5 per cent Tuesday.”

And just to bring it all home for consumers everywhere, the majority of high-value items such computer chips and technological wares as well as motor parts are manufactured in Japan. The extent of the disruption that the nuclear crisis may cause has not yet been measured. However, my point remains that, in today’s world, it is not a case of the Butterfly Effect. The increasing number of environmental catastrophes such these (lest we forget the Haiti quake of January 2010) has put into play the notion of a world that may suffer an implicit and possibly far-reaching domino effect.

Ultimately, the lasting regret of events of this scale will always be the loss of human life, but so too will we mourn the kind of attitude, displayed by “tweeps” this week, that does little to reinforce the faith we all have in the survival and evolution of humanity.

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2. In Full View: What of the Spectacle of Atrocity?
3. In Full View: The United States of Qaddafi

Imagine my surprise, then, when this week’s so-called “milk wars” imbroglio actually turned out to be a pretty good story. Eschewing the received wisdom of so many television current affairs programs, with their consumer guide “exposés” that seek to uncover the cheapest prices “for you and your family”, as though that somehow constitutes news, this week’s story forced news outlets to tacitly admit that sometimes low prices are not necessarily a good thing. In fact, they can be an outright bad thing, and for all parties concerned. Coles’ Australia Day announcement that it would cut the price of its generic milk products to one dollar a litre, effectively forcing its major competitor, Woolworths, and its minor ones, Franklins and Aldi, to follow suit, is being presented by many as having precisely such negative industry-wide effects. For dairy farmers, who argue that their farm-gate prices will suffer as milk processors’ profit margins are cut. For milk processors, who argue that they are being forced to cut those margins. For supermarkets, which have all wound up selling milk at the same price anyway, with no competitive gain for any of them, and which will have to make up the difference between the old price and new out of their own profits. Coles has argued that generic milk sales have in fact risen as a result of the cut, though this hardly seems like something that will last into the long-term if everyone is selling the stuff at the same price. As National Foods put it in its submission to the ongoing Senate inquiry into milk prices: “The inelastic demand for fresh white milk means that a reduction in the price of fresh white milk is unlikely to materially increase the demand for milk.”

To the extent that consumers are the short-term beneficiaries of such price-cutting measures is obvious. That they will continue to be so in the long-term is less so. The argument is that, should the links of the domestic supply chain buckle one by one, the result will ultimately be higher milk prices. Metcash CEO Andrew Reitzer, who is himself at war with the ACCC over charges of uncompetitive behaviour, last week accused Coles’ imported British executives of triggering a series of events that could end in the decimation of Australia’s manufacturing base. “They destroyed their dairy industry in the UK and now they buy all their milk from the Netherlands,” Reitzer said of Coles CEO Ian McLeod and his executive team. “Does that mean in five years time we are not going to have a dairy industry [in Australia] and we are going to buy all our milk in New Zealand?” A butterfly flaps its wings in the dairy section…

And, Coles argued this week, nothing happens. Repeatedly cast as the villain in the debate, the supermarket giant has just as repeatedly claimed that the whole thing—let alone its depiction in the media as “war”—is a beat-up. (At least we can be thankful that it hasn’t been labelled a “-gate”.) While it may sound disingenuous to claim that price cuts can be made in a causal vacuum, Coles is not entirely wrong in this assessment. The ACCC has certainly given weight to it, supporting a number of the supermarket’s claims. Addressing the Senate inquiry on its second day, the competition watchdog’s chief executive, Brian Cassidy, said that “there is no evidence that the cost of the discounting [...] is being passed down the chain.” And if it is, others have suggested, it is arguable that it hasn’t been felt there. Given supermarket sales of generic milk products constitute only six-and-a-half percent of all milk production in this country (and although the price cut will likely see that number rise at the expense of branded milk), some have suggested that farm-gate prices may drop little more than a cent. In a media release issued earlier this week, Coles addressed a number of “myths” about the cut, including that it would push down the farm-gate price of milk. “The farm-gate price dairy farmers receive is set by the world price because most Australian milk products are exported,” the release read. (Between 2008 and 2009, Victorian farm-gate prices dropped twelve to fifteen cents per litre as a result of fluctuations on the world market, a much more significant drop than any likely to be experienced here.) “In any case,” the release continued, “Coles buys milk from the major milk processing companies, not direct from the farm-gate.”

The one thing that hasn’t come up in the debate, it seems to me, is also one of the most important: what the hell sort of milk is worth a dollar anyway? Almost across the board, the “milk wars” have been exclusively about economic consequences: the effect on farmers, the effect on processors, the effect on household budgets. Approximately no one has asked whether it is nutritionally desirable for consumers to be drinking greater quantities of generic milk in the first place. Of course, many would argue that it doesn’t matter. In 2009, CHOICE, the independent consumer right organisation, found that generic milk labels delivered equivalent nutritional benefits to its branded counterparts. This is hardly surprising you remember that generic milk is more often than not brand-name milk under a different label. Coles-brand milk arrives at the store in Dairy Farmers crates. But I am not talking about the difference between generic- and name-brand milks. All processed milk is generic milk. And none of it is very good, for one’s body as much as one’s taste buds.

If Choice didn’t include raw milk as part of its study, that would be because the stuff, we are told, is hazardous to our health. Which is why it is only available for purchase in this country as a skin-care treatment for inner-city hippies. Not that anyone is buying two litres of raw milk in order to bathe in it, of course. A couple of weeks ago, I was at a friend’s house, at the tail-end of a long lunch, when my host asked if anyone would like coffee. “Do you take milk?” she asked the few of us who said yes. “And do you mind if it’s raw?” I don’t take milk with my coffee, but drank a glass of the stuff nonetheless: the complexity of the smell and the depth of the flavour leave the various processed brands for dead. Like stoners buying marijuana for so-called “medical purposes,” here we were guzzling an organic product that’s illegal for anything but treating acne. As was the case when Will Studd imported eighty kilograms of Roquefort in 2002, only to see the authorities bury it in a public dump, the absurdity was plain. Especially as the superiority of raw milk—which contains more fat-soluble nutrients than its processed counterpart, including omega-3 fatty acids, which many processing companies are now adding back into their milk artificially and then  jacking up the prices accordingly—has been proven time and again by numerous studies. It would not be stretch to imagine that modern-day lactose intolerance in more often than not intolerance to modern-day processing methods.

The great victory of the dairy industry has been to convince us that milk that has had its nutrients cooked out of it is better for us than milk that has still got them in it. (If it hasn’t convinced us that sick cows are as worthy producers as healthy ones—remember those pathetic creatures in The Corporation, foaming at the mouth and dragging their udders along the ground?—it is because they haven’t bothered to let us know about them.) Obviously, the industry has a vested economic interest in the dominance of their product, which needs to have a long shelf life so they can send it all over the country and the world. (My host says her raw milks doesn’t start separating for a week, which puts paid to the industry’s argument against its inconvenience, too.) But then, that’s the problem with the current debate: everyone has a vested economic interest in what’s happening and no interest whatsoever in anything else. Pro-market capitalists when it suits them, the farmers are now arguing for government regulation of the industry. Unhappy to make up the difference from its own profit margin, Woolworths is accusing its main competitor of anti-competitive behaviour. Happy to make up the difference that way until its competitors are forced to stop doing so, Coles is more than ready to wait until it can corner the generic market. And consumers—myself among them until this whole thing started—are happy to drink flavourless white dreck so long as it saves us a little money. What turpentine is to a hardcore wino, so milk appears to be to the rest of us.

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Don’t get me wrong. Like Muammar Qaddafi before me, I owe a lot to Hugo Chávez. It was he who, in the heady days of George W. Bush’s re-election and Hurricane Katrina, when I had a Socialist Alliance membership application sitting on my desk and the latest issue of Green Left Weekly in my backpack, convinced me that certain scions of the international Left were probably better left unlistened to. Those who, like Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Sean Penn, were happy to overlook certain anti-democratic and despotic tendencies, which were at that time appearing with increasing frequency, in the interest of supporting an anti-American bulwark in Latin America. Given the unavoidable fact, which so many on the Left somehow managed to avoid, that Chávez’s Bolívarian Revolution would be unrecognisable to Simón Bolívar himself, it occurred to me that, even among those who seemed morally unimpeachable, principle remained as subservient to politics as it was among those who seemed morally bankrupt. (Chávez’s claim that “there has long been a confrontation in the works between Monroe and Bolívar” overlooks the fact that the great Latin American independence leader supported the American Revolution and received news of the Monroe Doctrine with “sincerest gratitude”.)

According to the former group, western media have consistently overlooked Chávez’s historical economic reforms, which have greatly benefited poorer Venezuelans. Not so: almost every western journalist writing on Venezuela mentions the improved standard of living among the country’s poorer citizens. It’s just that they also mention, as those on the Left do not, Chávez’s consistent attempts to prolong his reign; his weird exhumation of Bolívar’s bones and subsequent assertion on national television that he is their reincarnation; his belief that Osama bin Laden is a myth and that the US never landed on the moon; his tell-tale inability to speak for less than four hours at a time; and, this week, at least, his refusal to denounce Qaddafi’s violence on the grounds that the two are “friends” and his insistence that, in any case, the reports of violence are all coming out of the US, are therefore probably false and not to be believed, and are a harbinger of the Great Satan’s eventual invasion of North Africa.

Chávez, of course, is not alone in this opinion. Fidel Castro was among the first, though also among the most cautious, to float the invasion thesis, and has urged against judging the Libyan leader prematurely. (It surely must pain old Fidel to do so, so desperately is he trying to win over Obama and normalise relations between their two countries.) Not to be outdone, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega was on the phone to Qaddafi not long after the protests erupted, expressing his “solidarity” and thereby abusing the term in the process. But it was Chávez who, characteristically, went to the furthest extreme, offering on behalf of his country to moderate negotiations between Qaddafi and his rebelling citizenry.

There can be no doubt who Chávez actually sides with. Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the head of the National Libyan Council, told Al Jazeera this week that opposition forces would “totally reject” the offer once they actually received it. At the time of publication, however, none of these forces had even been contacted. At the same time, calls for western assistance grew stronger among those fighting on the ground. “I want to give a message to America,” a rebel in Bin Jawad told the AFP as he gestured at a number of fighter planes circling above the city. “See these planes? We want a no-fly zone.” Are the Libyans requesting one of these to be considered warmongers as well? Better to assume they are so that the blood-for-oil meme can get another run at the expense of humanitarian concerns.

It is true that an embarrassing number of politicians and statesmen have lined up over the past eight years to embrace or shake hands with a man now ordering his planes to strafe civilians. For often completely cynical reasons, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, Barack Obama and others have been photographed time and again with the outlandishly done-up statesman-butcher. Much has necessarily been made of the Qaddafi family’s connections with the London School of Economics. Which is why Howard Davies resigned from his position as its director this week. While many western leaders may have debased themselves in the wake of Qaddafi’s calculated decision to discontinue Libya’s nuclear weapons program in 2003, the vast majority of them have, to their credit, refused to continue debasing themselves since the uprisings started a little over three weeks ago. Castro, Ortega and Chávez, in striking contrast, have continued to do so. Not only are they staying on in their positions—Qaddafi’s reluctance to leave is a common denominator among this lot—they are also happily maintaining their support for him. And the Left has happily maintained its support for them in turn. At least Beyoncé had the good sense to donate her fee for singing at a Qaddafi family function to Haiti earthquake relief. Over a year ago.

Castro, Ortega and Chávez have all suggested that the imposition of a no-fly zone will be the first step on the road to unilateral invasion. But then, all three have reason to be nervous about what’s currently happening to Their Man in Tripoli, whose career shares numerous similarities with theirs and whose downfall may eventually do the same. Borrowing the rhetoric if not the guerrilla tactics of Castro’s Movimiento 26 de Julio, Qaddafi came into power in 1969 as the result of a bloodless military coup, an example Chávez tried to follow in 1992 before giving peace and electoral politics a chance. (“The venomous attacks on Chávez have begun,” Pilger wrote in 2006, “and resemble uncannily those of the privately owned Venezuelan television and press, which called for the elected government to be overthrown.” Characteristically, Pilger failed to acknowledge that Chávez was jailed for two years after attempting to overthrow a similarly elected government in a similarly forceful fashion.) Although both leaders can claim significant and important reforms—Castro especially, in the fields of health and education—their attempts at political restructuring have all been at the expense of democracy. Recently renominated by his party for Nicaragua’s presidency, despite having served the maximum two terms allowed by the country’s constitution, Ortega now looks set to follow suit. All three share at least one thing in common with their beleaguered Brother Leader: they have continually used the rhetoric of revolution to justify various forms of despotism.

But where Qaddafi has, like Idi Amin before him, fashioned himself as a “strutting martinet,” Latin American’s strongmen have learned from the history of their continent and thus seek to maintain autocratic government using other, more insidious, methods: state-controlled media, the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions by legislation and decree, and the willingness to steamroll constitutional law where necessary.

The Left has roundly applauded these methods. When Chávez was granted the power to rule by presidential decree for eighteen months at the end of last year, a move widely seen as an attempt to neutralise his political opponents in the run-up to next year’s presidential elections, Eva Golinger nevertheless insisted that “Venezuela is not a dictatorship and President Chávez is no dictator.” (Chávez had previously called the Venezuelan-American Golinger “Venezuela’s sweetheart.”) Green Left Weekly maintained that his was “a democratic, humanist socialism” and not a “Stalinist distortion.” Many feel that the narrow victory of the president’s party in last September’s congressional elections was made possible only by his transparent and unconstitutional redrawing of the country’s voting districts and his ongoing attempts to weaken the country’s system of proportional representation in order to muscle-out opposition groups. Trotskyite writer Alan Woods, although acknowledging a certain disillusionment among the masses, nonetheless applauded the president’s claim to have been awarded another revolutionary mandate. “[Strengthening the revolution], and not the cowardly recipes of reformism, is the only way forward,” Woods wrote at the time. Besides which, he added, “elections are only a snapshot of the state of public opinion at a given time. [...] [I]n and of themselves they decide nothing.” Qaddafi might have said something similar about popular uprisings.

The reluctance of Latin America’s leftist leaders to condemn Qaddafi’s despotism is a tacit admission of their own. And the Left’s refusal to admit this fact constitutes a tacit acceptance of the same. ”It is at difficult times,” Ortega said this week, “that loyalty and resolve are put to the test.” Too true. But loyalty means very little without solid judgement to base it on. The warning holds as true for Chomsky and Pilger as it does for these so-called revolutionaries themselves. Beware the company you keep. It often says more about you than you’d like.

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Julia Gillard entered Radio 2GB’s Canberra studios last Friday morning in danger of being politically typecast as a ginger Pinocchio; to wit, a wooden puppet with a penchant for the big fib.

Her stilted media performances during the Queensland flood crisis had moved playwright David Williamson to pen an essay for Crikey decrying her terrible acting skills, likening her to “a pedantic, emotionless, primary school headmistress lecturing slowly and carefully to a particularly dull-witted class,” and whose default turn was “a stiff and wooden performance that gives us no idea of what she’s really feeling, if anything at all.”

That Friday morning, fresh from a spectacular backflip the day before over her categorical campaign promise not to introduce a carbon tax, she was now being branded a liar; a “Ju-liar”, even. The fact she had announced her new carbon pricing plan flanked by a cadre of beaming Greens—none of whose hands, incidentally, were visible on the evening TV news footage as they stood behind her—heightened the impression that others were now pulling the legislative strings of her fragile minority government.

That Friday, she had arrived twelve minutes late for her scheduled interview with 2GB’s chief reactionary “bloviagogue,” Alan Jones, and the dyspeptic parrot sprayed bile all over his cage in carpeting the Prime Minister for her tardiness, addressing the nation’s leader as if she were a truant caught punching bongs outside school grounds. But by the end of the interview, Gillard had at least demonstrated, in a media setting, that human sinews were at work beneath the power suit. What she had failed to dispel, however, was the notion that her minority government’s agenda was now being driven by the Greens. Indeed, her pointed refusal to acknowledge how blatantly she had broken her word spoke of a calculated political decision: namely, that to be viewed by the public as a liar was preferable to being seen as having been strong-armed by the Greens.

“Do you understand, Julia, that you are the issue today?” Jones thundered. “Because there are people now saying your name is not Julia, but Ju-liar, and they are saying that we’ve got a liar running the country.”

Cue playback of an agitated caller claiming to be nauseous and on the verge of tears over the prospect of a carbon tax. Gillard calmly but firmly reiterated the line that she believed Australians accepted the science of climate change and that they wanted a transition to a clean energy economy. At no stage however did she cede the point that she had categorically pledged, both at a presser and in print two days prior to the election, not to impose a carbon tax.

“PM,” Jones spluttered, “you launched the ALP campaign, you uttered 5400 words in that speech to the ALP faithful when you launched the campaign; you did not mention carbon tax, and you had one sentence on climate change. That’s your prospectus.”

But Gillard was in no mood to be browbeaten: “Oh Alan, Alan, are you suggesting in a thirty-five-day campaign the only speech I ever made, the only statement that ever came out of my mouth, was on the day of the ALP campaign launch? How ridiculous Alan, and how calculated to mislead your listeners.”

On the political fireworks scale, it was hardly Taiwanese Parliament Question Time. But compared to her anodyne performances on the campaign trail it represented a major departure for Gillard, a fact borne out by the prominent media coverage the exchange received. Gillard remained composed throughout, but her responses to Jones’s hectoring were uncharacteristically tart. This was parliamentary Julia, transplanted from behind the dispatch box.

News Limited’s Samantha Maiden claimed on SKY News that the carbon price story was now a “fun” one for journalists, because the Labor Party seemed to have reached the point where they’d “rather die on their feet than live on their knees,” and that losing the next election was now less important than getting an important reform on the books, and staving off a legacy as a government that accomplished nothing in both its first and second terms.

“People talk about the Labor Party losing its soul when they gave up the fight for an emissions trading scheme,” Maiden said, referring to deposed PM Rudd’s fatal post-Copenhagen backdown, “and I think you can underestimate how, kind of, humiliated a lot of the Labor MPs were that they just gave that up, that they didn’t do anything. I think part of this as well is about a rebuilding of morale in Labor troops.”

What rankles with many about Gillard’s approach, though, is her determination to try and prove that black is white; that she hasn’t gone back on her cast iron promise not to introduce a carbon tax at all. Leaving aside the fact that next to no detail about the plan has been released—that the tax, whatever rate it ends up being pegged at, is envisaged as a short term transitional measure en route to an emissions trading scheme, and that the hysterical figures being trumpeted in the media about impending cost of living price rises are pure speculation—would it really have been so hard to reiterate that circumstances have changed? That the parliament the people voted for, the most finely balanced hung parliament in seventy years, now necessitates a consultative policy process with the cross benches? That I broke a promise you made it impossible for me to keep?

In a word, yes; because Gillard now finds herself caught in a pincer movement between the Greens on the left, trying to seize a once in a lifetime chance to implement their radical policy agenda, and Labor hardheads on the right who are incensed at the idea of Bob Brown and Co. with their hands on the tiller of government.

Already, a group of Labor heavies led by right wing Senator Don Farrell has voiced its displeasure to the Prime Minister over Greens claims they have government backing for a Bill to legalise gay marriage and euthanasia (courtesy of some late night sleight of hand on a private members Bill). Even within forty-eight hours of the carbon tax announcement, Greens Deputy Leader Christine Milne went off the reservation and proclaimed that the new tax would be applied to petrol. The media shitstorm that ensued meant she was forced to swiftly retract, but it was further evidence of how emboldened the new junior partners had become.

Julia Gillard seems to have made a conscious decision prior to her stoush with Alan Jones: that it was better to be seen as blatantly dishonest by the electorate over her carbon tax fudge, than to be viewed as a puppet of the radical Greens. But as the talkback hacks begin to rail against Bob Brown’s Marxist cabal and the impending left-wing apocalypse, and Tony Abbott’s call for a “people’s revolt” produces daily death threats to the crucial independents, it would appear Gillard is in danger of being tarred with both brushes. In this hung parliament’s “new paradigm,” to admit you broke your word is to admit you were too weak to keep it.

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2. The Rabbit Bites: Le Roux’s Endgame

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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The Murals of Mexico: Juárez locals go about their business in front of a series of black and white murals that were commissioned by the city council to commemorate the Centenary of Revolution. Our last full day in Mexico was November 20, one hundred years to the day since the revolution began, and the city was celebrating accordingly. Juárez played an important role in the struggle: the capture of the city by Pascual Orozco and Francisco "Pancho" Villa in May 1911 led to the signing of the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez and helped to end the initial stage of the revolution. Villa's last significant military action was a raid on the city in 1919.

Bordertown Innocents: Dressed for Centenary celebrations, which included a street parade and a concert at Plaza Benito Juárez, a boy leaps into the air while his father waves a flag behind him. Police and military personnel attended both events in great numbers: while snipers took to rooftops along the parade route, mounted police traced endless circles around the plaza's perimeter.

Las Mujeres de Juárez: A group of women in traditional dress perform as part of the November 20 celebrations. Female soldiers, or soldaderas, played an active role in a number of revolutionary battles; the figure of La Adelita, the potentially apocryphal soldadera who fell in love with a sergeant and fought along side him, is a central component of the country's revolutionary iconography. A central component of Juárez's own own iconography is somewhat less appealing: las muertas de Juárez, the victims of femicide, whose numbers have, over the past eighteen years, climbed to anywhere between four hundred and five thousand.

The Red Balloon: A little girl, the colours of the flag in her hair, watches traditional dancing in the plaza.

Serenading the Stalls: According to reports, locals showed up for Centenary of Revolution events in far greater numbers than they did for Bicentenary of Independence celebrations earlier in the year, many of which were cancelled due to fear of potential cartel violence. "Well-attended," it seems fair to say, means something a little different in Juárez: here, a mariachi croons to a few sparsely-seated audience members, including a little girl whose costume suggests that she is a fellow performer.

The Turnout: The Juárenses who did attend, however, were more than happy to do so: they did not "brave the streets despite their fears," as the international media would doubtless have put it, but rather showed genuine excitement about the celebrations. As Nelia, one of the event’s organisers, told us: "I refuse to be afraid of my own city."

Readily Apparent Symbolism: The concert's headline act, dressed in the standard-issue cowboy outfit ubiquitous on both sides of the border, croons to a dove.

The Man of the Hour: Ciudad Juárez's mayor, Héctor Murguía, walks amongst the crowd. Murguía, who served as mayor between 2004 and 2007, was sworn in again on October 10, 2010, at the beginning of what would become the bloodiest month in the city’s history.

Tinted Windows and a Musician: Having faithfully executed his role in the proceedings, a guitarist wanders away from the plaza past a number of federal police vehicles.

Saddled Security: A column of mounted police officers monitors the perimeter of the plaza.

Outsiders: Military personnel stand guard as municipal and state politicians speak at the new Museo de la Revolución en la Frontera, which was inaugurated two days earlier and is housed in the city's former customs building. Following President Felipe Calderón’s declaration of war on the cartels in December 2006, police and military numbers along the northern border have exploded into the tens of thousands.

Blow, Gabriel, Blow: Local students form a drum and bugle corps outside the museum as a federal police officer looks on. According to a report released by the Washington Office on Latin America in November, a number of police and military personnel have been accused of human rights violations against citizens, with over four thousand reports of rape, robbery, forced disappearance and extrajudicial killings over the past four years.

Not Your Average Lapdog: Murguía speaks outside el Museo de la Revolución en la Frontera. The mayor's speeches tend to emphasise the importance of economic development over the president's increasingly unpopular military approach to the cartels, while also insisting upon the responsibility of the US to curb the demand for drugs that drives the trade. Although popular, however, the mayor has previously been accused of having links to drug traffickers himself. Four hundred of the city's police officers had to be fired following his first reign as mayor, after they failed confidence exams consisting of drug and polygraph tests.

Standard-Issue Balaclava: An anonymous soldier stares into the middle distance as one of the visiting dignitaries pontificates at the podium.

On the Record: Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. Twenty-two media workers, including photographers, have been murdered in the country since Calderón took office, at least eight in direct reprisal for reporting on crime and corruption. On September 16, the day after the country celebrated its Bicentenary of Independence, a photographer from the city’s main newspaper, El Diario, was gunned down on his lunch break, prompting the paper's editorial staff to write an unprecedented open letter to the city’s cartels headlined: “What do you want from us?”

Just Another Day in the Murder Capital of the World: Police officers arrest two men at Plaza Benito Juárez. By six o'clock in the evening, the streets are completely empty. As I wrote in a newspaper article at the time: "Juárenses may love their city in spite of the bloodshed it has seen, but it is precisely because of that bloodshed that they know better than to be outside after dark."

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2. Revolución en el Norte
3. Mexican Bicentenary II: Fireworks Fiesta

According to a BBC report, in July 2000, the ever-audacious Qaddafi arrived in Lome, Togo, for what would be the final summit of the Organisation for African Unity (founded in 1963 and rebranded in 2002 as the AU), in a convoy of three hundred vehicles. Having been isolated for years as leader of an alleged terrorist nation, in 2001 Qaddafi made an international comeback as Pan-Africanist visionary, successfully lobbying for the formation of the African Union.

Former South African president Thabo Mbeki took on the inaugural chairmanship. Qaddafi’s vision was of a federal union with the catchy title “The United States of Africa”—an interventionist body with its own Peace and Security Council, a peacekeeping force made up of African military resources. The AU was to have its own parliament and court of justice, with the aim of exercising rule of law in instances of crimes against humanity. Apparently, modelled on the European Union, the AU would eventually also trade with a single currency, and unlike the United Nations, no member of the AU would have the power of veto.

Granted, Qaddafi was not the first to imagine Africa as a uni-state. The term United States of Africa was first coined decades ago by activist and poet Marcus Garvey and then widely promoted by Ghana’s first post-independence president Kwame Nkrumah. In 2007, the fifty-three member states of the AU gathered in Accra, under the proposed notion that by 2015, Nkrumah and Garvey’s dream will have been realized and Qaddafi had even volunteered himself as president of this new USA—a novel concept.

In the world’s current fascination with the pending demise of “Mr Africa” (a name Qaddafi reportedly gave himself in the 1990s), the irony is not lost on me. After all, it is more than his many monikers that remain a point of contention.

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In 2009, Vanity Fair dedicated a tongue-in-cheek photo gallery to Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, focusing on the dictator’s reliably outlandish sartorial choices. Entitled ‘Fashion, Qaddafi-Style’, the piece was as notable for its pithy captions as it was for the selections of its photo editor. “Early Qaddafi,” one of them read, “before he learned the fine art of accessorising with maps of Africa and photos of dead people.” That Qaddafi bore a striking resemblance to Will Ferrell only added to the general sense of his being a buffoon, which continued through the Bedouin tent drama of the following month, up until his absurd and paranoiac diatribe at the United Nations on September 23. His UN debut was six times longer than it was by rights allowed to be. “He has a vice,” Christopher Hitchens told me of Hugo Chávez that same year, “which is always very well worth noticing because it’s always a bad sign: he doesn’t know when to sit down.”

An equally bad sign is not knowing when to stand down, either. The attention being lavished upon Qaddafi this week has little to do with how eccentric he is and more to do with the extreme and deadly measures he is taking to ensure he need not relinquish his forty-one-year stranglehold on his country. (Actually, that’s not completely true. His first television appearance after riots began this week was a sixteen-second clip of him sitting in a car with an umbrella over his head, denying that he had left Tripoli for Chávez’s Venezuela. The umbrella was too silly not to warrant a mention.) In attempting to prevent the revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt from being repeated in North Africa’s most repressive state, Qadaffi set about reminding those who had begun to take him for little more than an oddly-dressed curio just how his country earned that dubious reputation in the first place. There’s nothing scarier than a clown with scissors and this week the Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya unsheathed a pair for the ages.

The international community’s willingness to downgrade Qaddafi’s megalomaniacal madness to mere personal quirkiness in the wake of his 2003 offer to dismantle Libya’s chemical and nuclear weapons programs looks naïve at best and self-serving at worst. (To the extent that many foreign policy experts suspect Qadaffi’s offer was little more than a ruse to get sanctions on his country lifted, it is arguable that the attempts of oil-thirsty western leaders to reach out to him in the intervening years were similarly expedient.)

But this isn’t the first time we have made this mistake—that of downplaying the criminal as the comical or else confusing the one for the other—and it likely won’t be the last. In his 2003 obituary for Idi Amin, The Daily Telegraph‘s Charles Moore wrote that western politicians and commentators had often harboured a certain “fascination, verging on affection, for the grotesqueness of the individual,” which “occluded the singular plight of his nation.” In a 1977 Time article, His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, was referred to as a “big-hearted buffoon.” When Amin rounded up roughly two hundred US citizens in 1977 and forbade them from leaving Uganda, following condemnation from Jimmy Carter for the murders of Archbishop Janani Luwum and two of Amin’s Cabinet ministers, one White House advisor was reported as having asked why the administration’s first foreign policy crisis couldn’t have been “a more dignified one”.

There are countless other, more recent examples. Whether singing about how “ronery” he is in Team America: World Police or having a hugely popular Tumblr dedicated to photographs of him “looking at things,” North Korea’s Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, has become a comic figure almost everywhere but on the peninsula where his warships sink those of his southern neighbour, whose military positions his artillery routinely fires upon, and in the country he supposedly presides over, where his people are so poor that many have taken to eating grass. (The news that isolated protests have broken out in that country, too, over food and electricity shortages, comes as a pleasant surprise.)

Hugo Chávez’s comically creepy eccentricities—his tendency to leave a seat free at cabinet meetings should Simón Bolívar’s ghost ever wish to attend, not to mention his exhumation of the independence hero’s remains and his subsequent assertion on national television that he was most likely their reincarnation—don’t get in the way of our acknowledging his record of anti-democratic reforms, attacks on freedom of speech, support for Latin American terrorist organisations like the FARC, and his stockpiling of $4.4 billion worth of Russian weaponry, including tanks, over the past six years. It doesn’t get in the way of the fact he has presented replicas of Bolívar’s sword to, among others, Robert Mugabe, Alexander Lukashenko, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and, of course, Muammar Qaddafi. But that’s only because the Left’s uncritical celebration of him often gets in the way of it first.

There’s a reason we like the crazy ones best. The easiest to pillory are also the hardest to fear. They are also, however, the easiest to downplay, ignore, or—to make use a neologism coined by George W. Bush, no stranger to being pilloried himself—misunderestimate. This is not an attack on satire or parody, which are among the most useful weapons of the powerless. Rather it is a reminder: the most important thing about a clown with scissors is not the clowning but the scissors. Given the records of many of these “big-hearted buffoons” for nuclear proliferation, state sponsorship of terrorism, and repression of their own people, perhaps it’s time we realised that, to put it another way, the easiest to pillory are often also the easiest to enable.

Which is why what’s happening in Libya right now—inspired by the events of Tunisia and Egypt, but potentially more important than either—is really worthy of our attention. Unlike those in the west who spent the last eight years laughing at his wardrobe and the more patently ludicrous of his pronouncements, Libyans have never found Qaddafi that hard to fear and—until this week, at least—misunderestimated only themselves. That both of these facts should have changed so rapidly is monumental enough, though the possible ramifications are potentially even more so.

For there are other scissor-wielding clowns at work in the Middle East at present. You may remember Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from his riotous 2007 engagement at Columbia University, in which he denied, not only the historical facts of the Holocaust, but also the existence of Iranian homosexuals. You may remember Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from the somewhat less amusing crackdown two years later on thousands of young people who had taken to the streets of Tehran to protest the results of a fraudulent election that saw Ahmadinejad returned to power. If the Islamic Republic had a face, it would be that of Tim Curry’s clown in It.

While cracking down on protests at home this month, Ahmadinejad’s regime has meanwhile been revelling in those taking place elsewhere in the region. (“He’s going mad,” Jon Lovitz observes of Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer. “And I’m reaping all the benefits.”) On Tuesday, Iran sent two warships through the Suez Canal for the first time in over thirty years, celebrating Mubarak’s timely demise by giving the Israeli coastguard an ulcer. A STRATFOR report released this week suggested that Bahrain’s protests could be similarly advantageous for the Iranians, with the end of Sunni rule on the island likely to tip the Saudi-Iranian balance in the Gulf firmly in their favour. While the US has said Iran is not directly involved in the Bahraini protests, it remains true that the fall of King Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa could encourage Saudi Arabia’s Shi’ite minority to revolt, and perhaps even lead to the withdrawal of the US Fifth Fleet from Manama. What might be considered an Arab Spring on the one hand is very quickly turning into Springtime for Ahmadinejad: A Gay Romp with Mahmoud and Ali in Persia on the other.

It is for precisely this reason that Libya’s symbolic and strategic importance are so intimately entwined. As Michael Totten has observed, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak were “low-hanging fruit” compared with the leaders of the region’s totalitarian regimes. While it might sound strange to speak of degrees of unscrupulousness, Qaddafi has proven—by using attack helicopters and war planes where his mere authoritarian counterparts used tear gas and rent-a-mobs—that it’s not impossible. If Qaddafi succeeds in containing the uprising, and if he is allowed to get away with the mass murder it will take for him to do so, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad will be emboldened to do similarly at home should protests ever reach fever pitch there. (I woke up this morning to find that the argument over international intervention has begun in earnest, so that should the first clause of that last sentence come true the latter two might still be avoided.) If the Libyan people succeed in overthrowing Qadaffi, however, no regime can be considered safe anywhere, no matter how brutal or repressive its methods, no matter how out of their heads its heads. With the powerless everywhere running amuck, the powerful might finally warrant the punch-line.

Illustration by Melanie Cook, a freelance illustrator and cartoonist.

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The United States, like most adolescents, has a tendency to think of itself as the centre of the universe, with all events, anywhere and at any time, of interest only insofar as they relate back to the proverbial land of the free and home of the brave. As the last two months have amply demonstrated, this is especially true when people in lands that are not free prove that no one has a monopoly on bravery, and stand up against their repressive governments to demand liberty for themselves.

When Tunisians rose up against Zine El Abidine Ben Ali last month, and when Egyptians followed suit with the ousting of Hosni Mubarak last week, Americans responded in two ways: by asking how the events would affect themselves and by using whatever answers they could muster to prove their political opponents incompetent.

As a result, all that was really proven was the hypocrisy that exists on both sides of the aisle when it comes to the country’s supposed commitment to liberty. To Thomas Jefferson’s assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” contemporary lawmakers and media pundits tend to append a silent proviso: “but only insofar as this allows us to score cheap points against our opposite number.” Commitment to liberty in the abstract is more often than not these days an abstract notion itself: one would be hard-pressed to find a proper example of it on either side of the debate.

The rap sheet against the Right is in this case the more familiar of the two, in part because the events of the last two months have given us ample opportunity to be reminded of it. As the protests in Tahrir Square escalated last week, and as Mubarak’s position became increasingly untenable, conservative journals proved themselves reliably contemptuous of moral considerations. Urging the Obama Administration to continue backing the regime—even though, as Barry Rubin’s contribution to that argument in The Christian Science Monitor readily acknowledged, it would have been morally wrong to do so—was the least of conservative offences. Suggestions that Egypt might not be “ready” for democracy, and that free and fair elections might result in the “wrong” people getting elected—namely, the Muslim Brotherhood, about whom there has been save little written by anyone that has not come across as either hysterical or morally relative—smack of racism as much as they do of equivocation on key points of principle.

Glenn Beck—an easy target, to be sure, but a dangerous one that should be treated as the threat to common sense that he is—was similarly reliable, delivering a tirade of insane analysis that made even Bill O’Reilly appear moderate. Insisting that it had been engineered by an alliance of Islamists and Communists—”with help from Google,” no less—Beck claimed Egypt’s pro-democracy uprising was a sign of the so-called “coming insurrection” that he likes to go on about so much.

And this from the people who less than a decade ago insisted that bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East was a valid justification for war—or at least they did after all their other justifications had been rendered null and void. While fervently insisting upon personal liberty at home, the Right is accused of being interested in freedom abroad only when it is advantageous to US interests. The rest of the time, lip-service to democratic ideals is seen to suffice, especially in places where the wooden supports behind the façade are painted in the colours of the American standard. (In his defence, Beck is sounding more and more like an isolationist these days, though that almost certainly has more to do with his anti-government sentiments than it does with any anti-war ones.)

The counterargument was this week expressed loudest, if not most eloquently, by the Republican Party’s resident blonde Ringwraith. Whenever Ann Coulter stands up to speak, I always imagine that a set of fangs can be seen glinting in the spotlight when she opens her mouth. But surely she had a point when, at the Conservative Political Action Conference last Saturday, she deadpanned: “Well, the big news this week is liberals favour democracy in the Middle East. Where were they back when we were taking out the guy with the rape rooms? The one who gassed his own people, who invaded his neighbours, who tried to assassinate a president of the United States? ”

Almost everything else in Coulter’s address could be categorised as either a lie or as hate speech, but on this point she was correct. While the Left is happy to support uprisings against pro-American dictators like Mubarak, it nevertheless failed to support the ousting of a much worse anti-American one at the beginning of last decade.

If the Left’s hypocrisy is a harder one to argue against, it is only because it is harder to get to: those in charge of the Iraqi adventure screwed it up on such a monumental level—beginning with the lies they told in their attempt to get the rest of the world onside—that a number of important, but nevertheless secondary, arguments have been set up as discursive roadblocks, which make it extremely difficult for anyone to discuss the crucial point.

And that is that the adventure remained necessary even as its execution entered the realm of the impeachable: the moral imperative to act was there—in fact, had been ignored for too long—and the net result of that action, while certainly problematic, is nevertheless favourable to what existed before it.

The most common argument against this assertion is to point out the glaringly obvious difference between the invasion of Iraq and the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt: the fact that freedom—to the extent that it can be considered such—was imposed in Iraq by a foreign power, but claimed by the people of North Africa for themselves. In fact, some have been so bold as to suggest—as they did when the Green Movement took to the streets of Tehran in 2009—that what these uprisings really prove is that the US should have waited a couple of years for events to take care of themselves: Saddam’s regime, we are told, would have been toppled by the Iraqi people in due course.

What this argument fails to consider is the similarly glaring difference between Saddam’s Iraq and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Iran, on the one hand, and Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Mubarak’s Egypt, on the other. An authoritarian regime and a totalitarian one are very different things. So, for that matter, are a pro-American regime and an anti-American one. Driven predominantly by personal ego and greed, a pro-American authoritarian is never going to resort to blatant repression in front of the world’s cameras: the risk of having his $1.5 billion annual allowance cut off is too high. As we saw in Iran in 2009, anti-American totalitarian regimes are driven by ideological certainty and have few concerns about putting down an uprising. (That the events of July 2009 failed to convince prominent members of the international Left of the Islamic Republic’s true nature spoke volumes about the moral deprivations of knee-jerk anti-Americanism.) There is a reason why Iran’s protests of two years ago failed to develop into a full-scale revolution. There is a reason why an Egyptian-style Day of Rage planned for Syria failed to materialise. There is a reason why the argument that Saddam’s regime would have collapsed under its own weight collapses under its own. (Although, as Michael Totten has suggested, if an uprising can take place in Libya, it can take place anywhere.)

If the Left scores a point by calling out the Right’s opposition to Our Man in Cairo being ousted, then the Right scores one right back when it points out that the Left might well be mistaken for Tehran’s in Washington. (This is truer of the international Left, which admiringly describes Khamenei and Ahmadinejad as necessary bulwarks against the US in the Gulf, than it is of the political centre-left of Congress, which is not so given to false equivalencies.) But then, there’s nothing less interesting that a room full of hypocrites hypocritically accusing each other of hypocrisy.

What neither side can claim is to put very much stock in liberty, at least insofar as it might be considered a universal principle. It is a surprisingly rare individual who can be said to have supported in equal measure both the liberation of Iraq, in theory if not in practice, and the uprisings of the past two months. And yet, to anyone standing on humanitarian and pro-democratic grounds, it doesn’t seem that support for one should be necessarily exclusive of the other. Arguments that it is and should be feel somehow forced and unnatural. Jefferson’s use of the word “all,” so simple and true, demands a spirit of internationalism and precludes any attempt at equivocation. That “all” is the most important word in his sentence seems to me to be without question. (Feminists, of course, may beg to differ.) That it should so often be interpreted as “some” is more than a little disheartening. But the consequences of that interpretation are surely even more so.

Illustration by Melanie Cook, a freelance illustrator and cartoonist.

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When photographer Jodi Bieber was announced as winner of the coveted World Press Photo of the Year award for 2010, local media made much fanfare about the fact that she was only the second South African photographer to ever receive the honour. Yet hardly any reports actually stated who the first South African photographer to receive the premier award was.

After scouring the WPP’s online archives all the way back to 1977, I discovered that little-known press photographer Leslie Hammond had won the award that year for his image of the forced removal, under Apartheid law, of residents of a Cape Town squatter camp. The image shows a mass of people fleeing the tear gas used by police to disperse their protest march against the demolition of their homes. It’s an image that does not seem to have aged well in terms of its impact. No doubt, in that year alone there were probably thousands of images just like Hammond’s that came out of the country’s independent newsrooms and international photo agencies. Hence, looking at this image today, for me at least, there is little sense of the photographer’s individual position or voice. Hammond was working for The Argus daily newspaper at the time and so was very much a part of the almost generic journalistic approach of simply showing what’s there.

Very few photojournalists back then were able to give us a sense of critical exploration of the subjects or issues they captured and maybe there was simply no room for that in the industry. A year prior to Hammond’s achievement, Sam Nzima’s photograph of Antoinette and Mbuyisa Makhubu carrying a bleeding Hector Pieterson became the iconic record of the June 16, 1976, Soweto student revolt, which marked the turning point for white rule in the country. The image had far-reaching consequences both locally and internationally. The WPP jury that judged Hammond’s photo as the strongest image of 1977 was dominated by European and American members and so to that end it is possible to suggest that the clear-cut binary nature of Apartheid, and the degree to which photography was considered a “weapon of the struggle,” may have somewhat limited the language used to document the country’s story.

Which leads me to question whether there has been a real shift  today in what informs the WPP’s choice for Photo of the Year. What makes one image of human pain and suffering, anywhere in the world, more important or stronger than another? To what degree does the WPP panel of judges consider a distressing image an effective one?

When TIME Magazine published Bieber’s portrait of Bibi Aisha on the cover of their August 9, 2010, issue, it was accompanied by a letter from managing editor Richard Stengel with a title and blurb that seemed like a disclaimer: “What’s Hard To Look At: This week’s cover is disturbing but the reality it shows in Afghanistan is something from which we cannot turn away.” The cover carried the headline: “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” I’m not about to suggest that Bieber’s image of Aisha is an exoticism or fetishism of the plight of women in Afghanistan. We are told that eighteen-year-old Aisha was made aware of the implications of having her image published on the cover of an American magazine. Stengel assures us in his letter that “Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan” and that “she is in a secret location protected by armed guards and sponsored by the NGO Women for Afghan Women.” As we read this from our differing vantage points, the image before us of a young woman whose face was so grotesquely mutilated somehow softens. Distress makes way for pity as we read journalist Aryn Baker’s accompanying report on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban—and how they fear a Taliban revival. In a recent interview on a South African talk radio show, Bieber stated: “I don’t want to associate the picture with the politics. For me it’s about extreme violence against women.”

But still I have to wonder, when a commissioned photographer’s image is framed in the context of a blatantly political editorial agenda—which really is the inadvertent effect of Stengel’s letter to his readers—to what extent can we credit the image as being an instrument of social advocacy? “It’s an incredibly strong image. It sends out an enormously powerful message to the world, about the fifty per cent of the population that are women, so many of whom still live in miserable conditions, suffering violence. It is strong because the woman looks so dignified, iconic,” Ruth Eichhorn, one of the WPP jury members, told Reuters.

When I first saw Bieber’s image on the cover of the magazine, almost immediately I had associations of Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl. Obviously there’s a clear anthropological gaze about McCurry’s image on the cover of National Geographic. Only formally identified in 2002 as the subject of McCurry’s iconic portrait, Sharbat Gula, unlike Bibi Aisha, seemed to have had little participation in the making of the image, yet she too became a symbol both of the 1980s Afghan conflict and of the refugee situation worldwide. Is it possible that the WPP jury may have fleetingly made a similar connection, maybe even considered Bieber’s image on the cover of TIME in juxtaposition with McCurry’s portrait? Do the judges seek out images that contribute to the spectacle of atrocity, in the name of social awareness?

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—

Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

—

The Narco-Guide: Tomás's open-air taxi speeds down a Mazatlán street towards our first underworld-related stop. In an early moment of bilingual confusion, our driver and guide originally thought we were after little more than a tour of the city, the terms "drug tour" and "narco-tour" failing to register with him. (In fact, he thought we wanted to buy drugs.) "Let me take you to see a friend," he said. "He will understand you better." The friend in question, another cab driver, understood us perfectly. "Ellos quieren una gira mafia," he translated. "They want a mafia tour."

Burnt Out and Blown Away: Tomás sits in his cab outside a house that was recently blown up with seven people inside it. Beyond the self-evident fact that such attacks are drug-related, the specific motives behind them are often opaque. The perpetrators act with anonymity and impunity in equal measure.

The Patron Saint of Traffickers: Tomás points to a pendant featuring the image of Jesús Malverde, "the angel of the poor," who was hung for banditry in 1909 and has since achieved an ardent following among Mexico's criminal class. The Malverde cult is at its most fervent in Sinaloa: a shrine to the "narco-saint," as the media calls him, has been set up in Culiacán and attracts thousands of devotees each year. But criminals aren't the only ones praying to the possibly apocryphal bandit: some of his followers, like Tomás, believe that getting on Malverde's good side will help them protect their families from drug violence.

Riddled: The wall of a Mazatlán house dotted with bullet holes. Like the one before it and the one that will follow it, the building has been abandoned and now sits derelict.

The Pockmarked Fence: Six bullet holes describe an uneven vertical line of fire on a fencepost in one of Mazatlán's most dangerous barrios.

Dos Muertos: Tomás tells us that two people were killed in a drive-by shooting at the site we are about to visit. A Sinaloa native, Tomás remembers when Mazatlán was relatively peaceful despite the drug trade: the problem, he insists, is the power vacuums that are created every time a drug lord is arrested or killed by the authorities. "Everyone wants to be king when that happens," Tomás says. "Too many people wanting to be king is a problem. Things are better when there's only one king. Everybody knows their place."

Shelled: Filled with rubble and lacking a façade, graffiti scribbled across what little of it remains, houses like this one serve as a grim reminder of the violence that plagues the otherwise sun-kissed city, and as such as a warning to others not to cross the cartels or doubt their resolve.

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Perhaps that’s because the banner in question was stating something everyone already knew and nobody much cared about, because when an opposition member last week held up a banner proclaiming President Felipe Calderón an alcoholic the response was nothing short of furore. “Would you let a drunk drive your car?” Gerardo Fernandez Norona’s banner read. “No, right? So why would you let him run the country?” Adorned as it was with a picture of the president, the banner’s implication was clear. Had anyone hazarded an answer to its question, it is certain that they would not been heard over the cries of indignation.

Although the chamber’s session was suspended, those cries echoed beyond it for several days and predictably took on a life of their own. A question about Calderón’s intake of  fermented agave juice quickly transformed into one about freedom of the press after a respected journalist and media personality, Carmen Aristegui, was dismissed from her drive-time radio show for insisting that the president address the accusations. (The station said she had violated its code of ethics by giving credibility to a rumour.) Calderón’s office insisted in turn that the president would not dignify the accusations with a response. Which didn’t stop the president’s private secretary, Roberto Gil Zuarth, from dignifying them with one. Evoking his boss’s “physical strength” and “strength of character,” Gil’s defence was both heartfelt and loyal, though anyone who has ever seen the technocratic president up close could hardly be blamed for wondering who the young man was talking about.

Strength of character, of course, is the least of the president’s worries. Calderón may not have a drinking problem, but he certainly has a drug problem, and to the extent that the latter grows worse each day one could almost forgive him for having developed the former. With each passing week, or so it is beginning to seem, Calderón faces some fresh denunciation of his strategy in the war against his country’s drug cartels—cables released by WikiLeaks in December had US officials praising his commitment but fretting over his execution—or else some fresh debunking of his government’s various excuses for why it isn’t working.

This week has been no different. Appearing at a hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Thursday, US National Intelligence Director James Clapper described the abilities of the Mexican armed forces and federal police as inadequate against the cartels that act with impunity and ostentatious brutality along the country’s northern border. (The same border, coincidentally, that Arizona just countersued the federal government for the right to police on its own terms, which is another way of saying with extreme prejudice.) While admitting that Calderon’s military strategy had yielded results in some areas—most notably by capturing or killing four of the country’s eight cartel kingpins—Clapper said the country still faced “enormous challenges” and was being hamstrung by “resource constraints, competing political priorities and bureaucratic resistance.”

Earlier in the hearing, Maryland’s Rep. C. A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, the ranking Democrat on the committee, drew comparisons between the Middle East and Mexico, claiming the US should invest more resources in the country in the interest of national security. Clearly of a piece with the subtly shifting rhetoric of some in the international media, who have started referring to narco-trafficking as narco-insurgency, it is comments like these that have many inside Mexico not so subtly shifting in their seats. Hillary Clinton’s comparison, in September last year, of Calderon’s Mexico to the Columbia of the early nineties had a similar effect. The White House later played down Clinton’s suggestion that Mexico and Central America could do with a version of Plan Colombia, but the nationalistic canary in salt mine was already dead. Both sides of Mexican politics came out in fierce denunciation of the suggestion. The idea that the US military could intervene in Mexico—after taking over half a million square miles from it at the conclusion of the US-Mexican War in 1848—was too much to bear or remain silent about.

Motivated by these concerns—which, although understandable on an emotional level, are unlikely to ever be realised—many have found it necessary to remind the US that it bears some responsibility for the war on drugs itself and should not be so quick as to think it can win it. But if Clapper’s testimony on Thursday provided the week’s denunciation of Calderon’s strategy, then STRATFOR’s report on Mexico’s gun supply, released the same day, provided the week’s debunking of precisely this kind of blame-shifting excuse.

One of the most interesting stories to have come out of the war on the cartels thus far is that of the growing sophistication—and, worse, the growing number—of illegally imported firearms in the increasingly bloodied theatre. Mexican and US politicians alike like to claim that ninety per cent of these weapons come from the northern side of the border, a statistic that, paired with the unfortunate reality that the trade is being driven by demand on that same side, makes it easier to blame the more powerful neighbour for not only causing but also enabling the violence.

The oft-quoted percentage was derived from a June 2009 US Government Accountability Office report to Congress, which claimed that, of four thousand guns seized by Mexican officials and traced by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2008, eighty-seven per cent were found to have come from the US. As the STRATFOR report makes clear, however, those four thousand weapons came from a much larger sample: Mexican authorities seized some thirty thousand firearms from criminals in 2008, with information pertaining to only twenty-four per cent of them submitted to the ATF for tracing. Of that much smaller number, only an even smaller one—the four thousand from which we get our final figure—could be successfully traced.

In other words, only twelve per cent of the weapons seized in Mexico in 2008 were ever traced back to the US. While it is certainly true, and even probable, that a larger percentage might have come down through the border states, and while it is just as true that arms smuggling between the two countries remains a genuine problem, there is nothing to suggest the majority of the the total guns seized began their journey north of the Rio Grande. Indeed, the report goes onto suggest that precisely the opposite is true: a great many of the illegal weapons being used by the cartels—in particular the military-grade ordnance that lead Clinton to make her controversial comments about insurgency, such as South Korean fragmentation grenades and the M60 machine guns common to a number of Latin America militaries—are not even in the US arsenal. More likely they have been sourced through the international arms market—China is singled out for special mention—and from corrupt elements in the militaries of Mexico and its Central American neighbours.

None of this is to play down what the US actually is responsible for, of course. It is true that American demand keeps the cartels in business and that American legislation keeps the business illegal. If the weapons being used in the course of doing this business aren’t American as well, however, it serves little end to claim that they are, except to the extent that the end in question has been determined by your public relations department. Of course, your public relations department shouldn’t be coming up with excuses for drug-related violence anyway, especially when Héctor Murguía, the mayor of Ciudad Juárez—where, I learn as I write this sentence, another eight people were gunned down in a bar late last night—is out there blaming “lack of opportunity, lack of education [and] lack of justice” just as often as he’s blaming “the [world's] biggest consumer of drugs” and its proximity to the city he runs. What that sort of thing suggests is an unwillingness to take responsibility for the ones you might actually be able to do something about. Next thing we know you’ll be struggling to walk in a straight line and blaming the fact on a case of illegally imported Budweiser.

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There have been some brilliant profiles of Rupert Murdoch published over the past three or four years. Ever since his acquisition of The Wall Street Journal in 2007—potentially the last great power-play of the ink-stained battleaxe’s career—they have come out with almost predictable regularity. Detailing Murdoch’s manoeuvres in the boardroom, these profiles have taken it upon themselves to divine from these movements the man’s overriding motives, and to divine from these in turn a coherent narrative that explains the current phase of his career, which some consider to be his endgame.

My favourite of these is the keeping-newsprint-alive-until-he-shuffles-off-this-mortal-coil narrative. Its pathetic appeal is obvious enough: it casts Murdoch as a romantic figure, the last media mogul and dynastic tycoon, waging a nostalgic, almost chivalrous campaign in defence of the medium he loves. Murdoch is seen to be repelling the demotic, something-for-nothing barbarians at the gate, installing paywalls along the perimeter not because he thinks people will pay to access online news, but rather because he knows they won’t and might be forced to stick with old-fashioned newspapers a while longer as a result.

This is a narrative that appeals to liberal and conservative newsrooms alike. Whether a friend of the man who owns the news or a foe, anyone currently employed by a print media organisation has a personal interest in his attempts to bail out water from the ship, for no better reason that the self-evident fact that they’re going down with it, too.

Water, however, is precisely what this narrative fails to hold very much of. This week’s launch of Murdoch’s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, is merely the latest exhibit to be submitted into evidence, and like the rest of them it, too, suggests that his motives have little to with leading advocates of newsprint once more unto the breach. Like every other struggling publisher in the game, Murdoch is less interested in retarding the progress of online news for as long as possible than he is desperate to find the elusive business model that will allow him to make a dollar and a cent from it.

Despite the willingness of other news organisations to follow his lead (The New York Times‘ low-security paywall will kick into effect sometime in the next two months), Murdoch’s previous attempts to discover this model have mostly been spectacular failures, and these failures serve as the basis for one of the other dominate narratives surrounding his current motives. Advanced by those like Michael Wolff, the author of The Man Who Owns the News, this narrative portrays him flailing his arms wildly on the heath of the digital marketplace, with absolutely no idea what he’s doing, his kingdom falling down around him. If the first of the narratives casts Murdoch as Quixote, this second one casts him as Lear.

Given News Corporation’s strong first-quarter showing, this narrative doesn’t exactly hold water, either, though it remains true that The Daily is unlikely to be the venture that breaks Murdoch’s losing streak in the digital realm. In the short term, at least, the publication looks likely to lose the numbers game. Having already sunk some US$30 million into The Daily, Murdoch has said he expects it will cost half a million dollars a week to operate. Subscriptions will cost users US$0.99 a week or US$39.99 a year, with Apple to take a thirty per cent cut of all sales in the first twelve months.

Of the fifteen million people who purchased an iPad last year, however, experts estimate that only one per cent are likely to purchase a subscription. One struggles to see how The Daily will be able to break even, let alone make a profit, if this turns out to be true, especially as someone is bound to enter the marketplace with a free alternative before too long. (Murdoch’s assertions that The Daily is aimed in part at young people throws into sharp relief the extent to which he fails to understand that the only type of publication we’re interested in is this second type. An unauthorised website indexing The Daily‘s articles was online within twenty-four hours of the publication’s launch as if to assert that fact.)

The long term prospects for The Daily are another matter, mostly because there might not be any. Murdoch isn’t exactly known for sticking around and seeing his short-term failures through, an observation that is especially true of his digital ones, many of which, like The Daily, started out as his own pet projects. The roll call of these is as long as it is embarrassing: iGuide, MySpace, Fox Interactive, IGN, PageSix.com…

And those are only a few of the strictly web-based ventures. Murdoch’s attempts to drag his print properties’ websites kicking and screaming back into the twentieth century has hardly been a roaring success, either. The Times of London’s website saw its traffic plummet by ninety per cent when it introduced its controversial paywall halfway through last year, prompting it to raise its advertising rates. Why an advertiser would choose to advertise on a site with declining traffic is anyone’s guess, not to mention purely hypothetical in this case, seeing as many advertisers chose exactly the opposite and took their business elsewhere. Just how many left is unclear, as is the extent to which the rates had to be increased. The Times has been reluctant to release many numbers at all, including overall sales figures. A telling caginess.

Murdoch has often made the argument that some content simply deserves to cost money. As the examples of The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and the The Australian Financial Review websites have proven, when it comes to specialist news analysis, especially in the fields of business and finance, some consumers feel the same. And it is certainly true that good journalism—especially investigative and foreign reporting—costs a lot of money produce. (Of course, the latter of these points is a good argument for the necessity of well-funded public broadcasters, not that any of those who make it ever do so on those grounds.) As James Murdoch has insisted as regards The Daily, the quality of the publication’s journalism will have to be such that it convinces readers that it is worthy of their money, too.

Early reviews hardly made The Daily out to be very unique, however, and a quick glance at those aforementioned indexed articles merely confirms that it isn’t. What I read struck me as a cross between Slate, the free online magazine, and mX, the free afternoon rag handed to commuters as they walk through the turnstiles at Australian train stations. It seems unlikely that, if a reputable paper like The Times can’t get people to pay for its online content, a lightweight new media novelty like The Daily is going to have considerably more trouble, even with the full force of News Corporation and Apple behind it. (Given I don’t subscribe to The Times‘ website, I have no idea what it had to say about the popular uprising in Egypt this week, though if it was anything like the online coverage of Murdoch’s Australian newspapers I think I might have had buyer’s remorse. Some content—rewritten wire copy, for example—doesn’t deserve to be paid for at all.)

In Howard Brenton and David Hare’s Pravda, Lambert Le Roux, the unscrupulous media tycoon at the centre of the piece, admits to an editor whose career he is trying to ruin that he spends many nights awake in bed struggling with “the great melancholy of business.” One can easily imagine Murdoch regularly struggling with the same. As one person posted on Twitter yesterday: “I will simply never pay for news content. I don’t care if costs one cent per day.” The number of people who share this mindset is increasing and it is staggering. And the fact of the matter is that the trend is unlikely to be reversed.

But then facts, as Quixote famously cried, are the enemy of truth, and Murdoch is nothing if not contemptuous of anything that gets in the way of the truth as he sees it. While it may be easy to imagine him struggling, like his fictional counterpart, late into the night, it is almost impossible to imagine him ceasing that struggle—the tilting at windmills and railing against storms—any time soon.

Illustration by Melanie Cook, a freelance illustrator and cartoonist.

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3. The Rabbit Bites: Some Men are Created Equal

I have experienced four such days in three different countries in the past eight months: the Fourth of July in the United States, la Día de la Independencia and la Día de la Revolución in Mexico, and Australia Day back here on what Icehouse once so memorably called the prisoner island. Three of these celebrations I could, and did, get behind wholeheartedly.

My reasons for doing so are pretty straightforward. The signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was a monumental occasion and deserves to be celebrated even outside the United States. While most of the document reads as an idiosyncratic rap sheet against Mad King George, its famous, post-preamble paragraph stands as one of the finest evocations of “self-evident,” “unalienable” rights we have: the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 is unimaginable without Jefferson’s trifecta of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” from over a century and a half earlier.

Of course, I spent Independence Day last year with two Puerto Ricans, for whom the celebration of America’s independence from Britain cannot but inspire ironic reflection on the status of their own island protectorate. The Mexican anniversaries, by contrast, are somewhat less problematic. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla’s famous call to arms in the town of Dolores on September 16, 1810, sparked eleven years of turmoil that eventually led to the overthrow of colonialism in New Spain. Given his generally impressive track record before his later, repressive years in office, Porfirio Díaz’s removal from power a century later—another event that led to over a decade of bloody struggle—requires a more complex cost-benefit analysis, but is no less worth celebrating for this fact.

By contrast, Australia likes to mark the day in 1788 that the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove and proclaimed British sovereignty over the eastern seaboard of New Holland, thereby dispossessing the indigenous population of their land and introducing a white one draped prettily in chains. If January 26 arouses any feeling at all, it should be one of sober reflection on the twin pillars of our colonial past: genocidal dispossession and antediluvian crime and punishment.

Of course, these are the things that we as a people most like to forget about ourselves, and pretending that the date of the holiday is empty of any meaning beyond than that which we bring to it allows us to do exactly that. Celebrating Australia Day on January 26 keeps the past hidden in plain sight, like the envelope of money under the newspaper on the table, the one place the stormtroopers don’t look as they turn the rest of the house upside down.

It is true that no other day seems to offer itself as being entirely suitable. ANZAC Day, the country’s second most significant day of national chest-beating, is notable for marking an even less auspicious landing on a fatal shore: that of the troops at Gallipoli, where they were mowed down by, and in the name of, empire. Despite the prevalence of Southern Cross tattoos you see on biceps around the place nowadays, December 3, the date of the Eureka Stockade, seems an even more unlikely choice.

Probably the most sensible option for a day of national celebration would be the anniversary of the country’s federation. While the establishment of a single colony, out of an an eventual six, arguably lacks the national significance usually required by such a day, the coming together of those colonies over a century later was the direct result of what had become, by that time, a genuinely national consciousness. While the Centenary of Federation was duly celebrated on January 1, 2001, however, the idea of moving the national booze-up to the first day of the year—and thus to subjecting ourselves to hangovers on two consecutive mornings—remains unappealing to many. Commonwealth Day, as January 1 was known in 1902, has never taken off, and for no better reason than the irrelevant fact that we already have New Year’s Day off.

It has become common, among the men and women of the country’s cynically populist press, to attack any such criticisms of Australia Day as “un-Australian,” the negating prefix serving as both the crux and the extent of their argument. But it is worth remembering that, historically, “patriotism” was in fact another word for precisely this kind of oppositionist critique. As Christopher Hitchens points out in his book on Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Samuel Johnson’s famous dismissal of patriotism as “the last refuge of the scoundrel” was not an attack on nationalism, as so many have mistakenly quoted it since, but rather a dismissal of those then preaching radical and democratic ideals at home and abroad. (The Toryist doctor was wholly against the American rebels, for example, not to mention their professed ideals. “I am willing to love all mankind,” he wrote, “except an American.”)

Keeping this in mind helps us to make a useful distinction between patriotism and nationalism. The former, taken in its historical sense if not necessarily in its contemporary one, can be considered a position of critical optimism and the latter one of uncritical jingoism.

Consider the ugliness of the following sentence, overheard by accident during television coverage of this week’s celebrations: “The Union Jack and Southern Cross were everywhere today.” While admitting that a certain amount of goodwill towards one’s country can be a positive thing—if only for one’s mental health and general constitution—one can’t but reflect on the symbolism involved and the unthinking acceptance, and even approval, it was afforded by the speaker. For a country with a foreign monarch as its head of state and where corporate mining interests can determine the fate of elected officials, it seems an entirely accurate observation. That is also a wholly depressing one seems to have been lost on the newshound in question.

In marking independence from colonial powers and freedom from repressive regimes, the first three celebrations discussed here might all be seen, to greater or lesser degree, as patriotic holidays. By mindlessly marking the dispossession of a people by an imperial power from whose insipid yoke we have not yet chosen to disabuse ourselves, and by refusing to contemplate either the crime of the former or the telling infantilism of the latter, Australia Day remains a strictly nationalistic one. Talk about drinking to forget.

Matthew Clayfield is a freelance journalist, critic, screenwriter and playwright.

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1. The Rabbit Bites: Go West, Young Man, Go West!
2. The Rabbit Bites: Fear and Loathing in Arizona
3. The Rabbit Bites: Mexico’s Smoking Guns

Not that the Georgians were much concerned about being found out upon their return. The Cuban authorities don’t stamp the passports of tourists at immigration and thus no one back home would be any the wiser. At the Hotel Sevilla, where Graham Greene set parts of Our Man in Havana, and where I ran into these tourists again, I pretended to be watching them from behind my aviator sunglasses and a potted fern. After a couple of mojitos, I thought it would be funny to scare the tourists by pretending to be a spy on the lookout for people breaking the embargo. They disappeared into an elevator not long after they spotted me.

The point of this story is to demonstrate how easy the embargo and its attendant travel bans are to break and to highlight the necessity, as well as the essential inadequacy, of certain relevant policy changes that were announced by the US government last week.

On Friday, President Barack Obama announced that religious groups and students would henceforth be allowed to travel to the island and that measures would be introduced to allow US citizens to send remittances to non-family members there in the interest of supporting private enterprise. While positively building on measures introduced by the administration two years ago—namely, the relaxation of travel and gift parcel restrictions on Cuban-Americans with family on the island—the economic embargo against the country remains in place as ever. The response from the anti-Castro lobby in Florida and New Jersey has nevertheless been predictably swift and damning.

“Loosening these regulations will not help foster a pro-democracy environment in Cuba,” said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican congresswoman from Miami and the House Foreign Affairs Committee chair. “These changes undermine US foreign policy and security objectives and will bring economic benefits to the Cuban regime.”

The best that can be said about Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen is that she at least takes no half measures: this really is lying at its baldest-faced. To the extent that the ostensible strategic purpose of the embargo is to weaken the Cuban government and embolden the Cuban people, the fact is that it is at least as counterproductive as it is supposedly counter-revolutionary. US-Cuba policy has long undermined itself.

Far from weakening the Castro regime, which is financially destitute for reasons of its own, the embargo merely allows the Cuban government to cast itself as the victim in a war of economic aggression. Both sides may be accused of hypocrisy on this front: Cuba for claiming that its fifth-largest trading partner is trying to cripple it economically and the US for trading with a country that it claims to be crippling economically (while imposing sanctions on foreign companies who do similarly). But on the frontline of the propaganda battle the underdog clearly emerges the victor: the US comes out of the embargo discussion looking a rather petty hegemon. Given the US government’s historical mission has been to discredit the Castros at every turn, surely must be of some strategic benefit to put paid to their assertions that the embargo is to blame for the country’s economic woes.

There is a risk in doing this, however, and that is that now, with many of the country’s smaller industries opening up to privatisation, loosening travel and remittance restrictions will actually benefit ordinary Cubans. Were the end of the embargo to coincide with the birth of a free, or even semi-free, market in Cuba, the US would potentially run the risk of “proving” the regime’s claims “correct,” with improved conditions on the ground mistakenly attributed to one country’s policy shift instead of the other’s. (Of course, decentralisation is not at all the predetermined outcome of the recent changes to Cuba’s economic model, though these things do have a tendency to snowball.) Were the US to maintain the embargo through Cuba’s economic reinvention, however, it would almost certainly be accused of acting in bad faith: many believe that any movement towards privatisation on the part of Fidel and Raúl should be encouraged and rewarded. Joseph Heller once wrote a novel about this sort of thing.

If all this seems to reduce the US-Cuba relationship to a matter of public relations, perception management and spin, it is worth remembering that, since the fall of the Soviet Union nearly twenty years ago, that has very often been the extent of it. The embargo today is as purely symbolic in its function as its symbolic function is out of date.

If the US was genuinely concerned about fostering “a pro-democracy environment” across the straits, and not merely about saving face, the embargo would have been lifted over a decade ago. Increased contact between Americans and Cubans would only help facilitate the flow of ideas and information—including those about democracy and human rights—between the two countries. This is especially true in the case of artistic exchanges, such as the American Ballet Theatre’s appearance at the Festival de Ballet de La Habana for the first time in five decades last year, and El Ballet Nacional de Cuba’s scheduled appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music later this year. I am hopeful that one of my own pet causes—the preservation of Hemingway’s house, Finca Vigia, in San Francisco de Paula—will similarly benefit from an increased flow of social, human and financial capital.

But then Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen and her comrades often appear to be motivated more by the personal animosity of the first- or second-generation exile—not to mention by contributions from anti-Castro lobbyists to their campaigns—than by any such genuine concerns. (Revenge, as the old saying doesn’t quite go, is a dish best served legislatively.)

Are we really to believe that they would rather leave Cubans’ perceptions of the US to the boring moustachioed fellow on state-run television who drones on for several hours each day about “imperialismo norteamericano”? To subtitled re-runs of Lie to Me and Fidel’s weekly two-page rant in the Communist Party newspaper? What sort of message does the US send about its professed ideals of freedom and liberty—about the “pro-democracy environment” on its own shores—when it so readily denies its citizens the right to travel wheresoever they please? This is the embargo’s real contribution to the Cuban pro-democracy movement.

That almost everybody on either side of the congressional aisle is in favour of doing away with the embargo, and has been for some time, is common knowledge. More than half the US population, too, is now in favour of normalising relations with the island. Obama’s changes to US-Cuba policy last week were a welcome step in that direction. But only Congress has the power to lift the embargo and be done with it, and with a handful of conservatives ninety miles from Havana effecting one of their own to prevent precisely that outcome, it seems likely that passports will be going unstamped for quite a while yet.

Matthew Clayfield is a freelance journalist, critic, screenwriter and playwright.

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1. The Rabbit Bites: Some Men are Created Equal
2. The Rabbit Bites: Will the Real Revolutionaries Please Stand Up?
3. The Rabbit Bites: Mexico’s Smoking Guns

Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Boy: Estuardo, on the morning we met him, sitting against a wall near the train tracks in Arriaga, Mexico.

Our coverage of Central American migrants in Arriaga—easily the best work we did in Mexico, not to mention the most popular and personally affecting—ended with a freight train snaking its way to the north as lightening lit up the sky to the south-west. Carrying between two and three hundred indocumentados, all heading to the US-Mexico border with the intention of crossing it to a better life, the train, I wrote at the time, would be taking “a direct route into a wholly uncertain future”.

Last week, we learned what that future held, and feel that it is only fair to those who followed the story so closely here, as well as to the migrants themselves, that we share that information. In short, many of the migrants we met and befriended three months ago have since become the very statistics we hoped they might avoid becoming.

Our suspicions that this might be the case were piqued while we were still in Mexico, when Austin’s mother, Lori, and friend, Will, both received calls from someone in Veracruz purporting to be speaking on behalf of Estuardo. The seventeen-year-old Guatemalan, whose experiences served as the emotional core of our coverage, had been given their phone numbers not long before the train was to leave town and told to call them once he reached the United States. The connection was bad and the man’s English rudimentary and by the time we had someone call him back he was gone. Worryingly, he had been calling from a payphone. Money was not mentioned in either call.

Another call was received last week. Andres, the softly spoken Honduran schoolteacher who aimed to make enough money to start a language school back home, rang Austin from Guadalajara to let him know that he was still alive. Many others, he said, were not.

The train was not long out of Arriaga when the violence began. At least three men—including one we had apparently spent quite a bit of time with—stood up and revealed themselves to be members of Los Zetas, the drug cartel offshoot that controls much of the southern migrant route and is well-known for its ostentatious displays of brutality. They started making demands of the passengers and threw the first one to refuse them from the train. Others, Andres said, began to leap from it in fear of what might happen to them if they remained onboard. A group of Guatemalans was abducted not long afterwards, with women and children among those taken.

Andres tracked down Estuardo in Ixtepec and stuck with him until Veracruz, where the younger, more vulnerable of the two was beaten and eventually deported. (Were the phone calls Lori and Will received being made by an immigration official? Why, then, was he calling from a payphone?) Andres said he suspected that Estuardo’s story about having a cousin in California, who had lined up work for him in a bakery, was false, fabricated to make us feel better about his chances of survival. It is true that, when we called the number Estuardo had given us for his cousin, we were told by the voice on the other end of the line that it was not connected and to try again.

Andres has thus far fared much better. From Veracruz, he made his way to Ciudad de México, where he worked for a man who helped him get an identification card, eventually earning enough money for an onward ticket to Guadalajara. He spent his first Christmas away from his family in that city and is currently working there to pay for the next leg of his journey. His sister, who had been told by their mother that he had gone south to Panama in search of teaching work, learned the truth on Christmas Day.

Three months after we last saw him, Andres now hopes to make enough money to be able to continue onward to Nuevo Laredo, where he claims to have a contact who will organise safe passage across the border in exchange for two or three weeks of work. While Andres claims to be optimistic about his chances, Austin said the fear in his voice suggested otherwise. Andres said he has seen men killed and women raped and that he sees them all again when he lies down to sleep at night. He promised to call Austin again before he departs for el norte.

While Andres was always very nervous about his trip, Austin and I were never too worried about his chances. With his solid build and impeccable language skills, we always suspected that criminal gangs would target more vulnerable-looking targets than him, and that he would be able to talk his way out of any run-ins with corrupt officials. Estuardo was a different matter and the news of his deportation came as a terrible, but not entirely surprising, blow. In the days following it, I often found myself reflecting, with a sense of bitter irony, on one of his favourite pastimes in the week we got to know one another. Lying against a wall in the shade, Austin’s iPod earphones in, Estuardo would begin to sing, in a language he didn’t understand, words encapsulating the nascent hope that was driving him and his fellow travellers north. Gorillaz’s Clint Eastwood, it turned out, happened to be one of his favourite songs:

I ain’t happy, I’m feeling glad.
I got sunshine, in a bag.
I’m useless, but not for long.
The future is coming on.
It’s coming on,
It’s coming on,
It’s coming on.

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1. Migration I: Waiting On the Arriaga-Ixtepec
2. Migration II: Boarding the Beast
3. Migration III: The Good Shepherd

While the hyperbolic and often violent rhetoric of Republicans and the Tea Party has come in for much-needed criticism, those making the criticisms have only cursorily admitted that they too have taken a similar tone in their own campaigns and commentary. Democrats have been accused of politicising the tragedy in a base attempt to gain political mileage, an accusation that amounts to little more than an attempt to do exactly the same.

A political assassination, however, is by its very nature political: attempts to depoliticise last weekend’s tragedy—to explain it away as inexplicable, a psychopathic rampage without social cause and necessitating no social consequence—are disingenuous. The fact is that even psychopaths don’t operate in a vacuum: issues like gun control and political rhetoric are relevant to what happened, regardless of the shooter’s mental condition.

In fact, both are crucial precisely because of it. If, as those attempting to depoliticise the shooting have claimed, Jared Loughner was simply an unhinged psychopath, how and why was it that he was so easily able to purchase a semiautomatic pistol with a high-volume magazine capable of firing thirty-one rounds? Gun law reform—which many pro-gun advocates like to pretend means a blanket ban on guns, which it needn’t be and usually isn’t—could well prevent such unhinged psychopaths from ever getting their hands on such weaponry. While it is true that those who really want to kill someone will find a way to do so regardless—a truth, nevertheless, that does not constitute an argument against the benefits of reform—the fact remains that those countries that have implemented strict gun laws have witnessed striking declines in the number of murders and suicides by shooting each year.

Just as the problem is not what the sane will do with a gun, but rather what the maniacs will do, so the problem with violent rhetoric is not how sensible, law-abiding people will respond to war metaphors and images evoking violence—Glenn Beck’s claim that “the war is just beginning” after a version of the healthcare bill was passed last year or SarahPAC’s now-infamous crosshairs over Gabreille Giffords’s congressional district—but rather how the unhinged might.

It is true that attempts to associate political rhetoric with the shooter’s motives are at best pre-emptive and that the idea of holding certain commentators criminally culpable for them is ludicrous. But the criticisms levelled against the chattering classes—which is to say the howling banshees of the twenty-four hour news media—are made no less valid by this admission and the discussion around them no less worth having. In a highly partisan media landscape better known for self-congratulation than self-reflection, any time spent contemplating the civic responsibilities of a free press and the relationship between rhetoric and action is well spent, even when the events that trigger the expenditure are so often regrettable.

It is clear from the shooter’s writings, however deranged and confused they may be, that he considered himself a political actor. If he was merely an unmotivated maniac he would have shot up a high school assembly instead. It is also clear from his writings, however, that many of his political ideas were to the right of even the most conservative Tea Partiers and Murdoch employees. Indeed, a large part of the Republican and FoxNews self-defence has been that not even the craziest fringe-dwellers among them agree with the conspiracy theories of David Wynn Miller and others of his ilk, whose influence on the troubled twenty-two-year-old gunman is obvious. (Beck comes closest to this kind of absurdity, but even he has never suggested that the government is using grammar to exert mind-control on its citizens.)

It was for this reason that I wasn’t surprised when I heard that the weekend’s shootings had taken place in Arizona. Of the nineteen states I visited last year, including those of the Deep South, Arizona was easily among the most reactionary (as opposed to merely conservative) and far and away the most paranoiac in character. This appears to be a view shared by Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who kicked-off the debate around rhetoric on the weekend when he boldly labelled Arizona “a Mecca of prejudice and bigotry.”

For my part, I remember one telling evening, at a pool party in Mesa, when my host revealed himself to be, not only a 9/11 “Truther,” but also a “Birther,” a moon landing sceptic, and a keen supporter of the minutemen, the anti-immigration vigilantes who have a history of sending death threats to Arizona’s Democratic representatives. The state’s highly controversial immigration enforcement bill had been signed into law only two months earlier, giving police the power to arrest and charge anyone they suspected of being an illegal immigrant. (I was the only person at the party with anything negative to say about the bill, versions of which are currently making their way through the state legislatures of Kentucky, Nebraska and Florida.) In May, the month before I arrived in America, John McCain had appeared in a campaign commercial promising to “finish the danged fence,” by which he meant the double- and triple-layered wall that runs along Arizona’s border with Mexico. My host dismissed the former presidential nominee as “too liberal” for his tastes.

What was most striking about my host’s opinions, however, was the fact that nearly everyone else I met in the state appeared to share them with him. I have some very good friends in Arizona and consider it one of the most beautiful states in the union. But by the end of my five days there I couldn’t help but feel that to its famous five Cs—copper, cotton, cattle, citrus and climate—one could easily add a sixth: crazies.

Matthew Clayfield is a freelance journalist, critic, screenwriter and playwright.

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1. The Rabbit Bites: Mexico’s Smoking Guns
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3. The Rabbit Bites: Go West, Young Man, Go West!

—

Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Through the Sierra Tarahumara: El Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacífico—El Chepe, as the train is more commonly and affectionately known—tears through the Sierra Madre Occidental's south-western section, the Sierra Tarahumara, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Six hundred and twenty-eight kilometres long, the world-famous railway took almost ninety years and ninety million dollars to complete, and was designed to connect the Pacific Ocean with Mexico's central desert territory.

Packing Heat: Soldiers—one of the most ubiquitous and visible groups in Mexico, not to mention in the drug-wracked north—stand at ease between two carriages. Occasionally, the train will stop and let them off to investigate something or other on the side of the tracks, but mostly they confine themselves to their seats or the cafeteria car. (One even spends a good twenty minutes flirting with two girls ordering coffee.)

A Loop at Altitude: El Chepe passes through some of Mexico's most rugged and beautiful terrain, hugging cliff-faces, crossing ravines, and winding around, ever so slowly, up through the mountains from sea level to an altitude of some two-and-a-half thousand metres.

Cowboys in the Cafeteria Car: From the moment it opens at around eight in the morning, the cafeteria car is full of life. Unlike the first-class service, which caters to foreign tourists and boasts a proper dining car, the economy service stocks little more than snacks and coffee. It also takes a little longer to reach its final destination: while the first-class service stops only at tourist attractions, the economy service stops at all stations along the route, picking up and dropping off those who live in the mountains.

At a Clip with the Wind: An elderly man—one of the most intense and impressive cigarette smokers we have ever seen—stands at the window between two carriages while a cliff-face blurs behind him as he passes.

A Failed Generator: Sometime in the afternoon, the cafeteria runs out of power. ("Come back in an hour," Austin is told when he goes to order a pizza snack. "Come back in another hour," he is told when he comes back after sixty minutes.) Unable to heat food or boil water for coffee, the woman behind the counter sends for a generator. The moment she tries to use it to power a microwave, however, the thing begins to haemorrhage smoke: we help prop open the windows using a couple of nearby milk crates and are then ushered out and kindly asked to not to take photos or breathe the smoke in.

Reflection: A man sits on the platform in Bahuichivo, Chihuahua, at an elevation of around sixteen hundred metres.

Servicing the Canyon: Food stalls line the railway platform at Divisadero, the only village on the line where the train stops for more than three or four minutes. It does so to allow its passengers the opportunity to see the remarkable Barranca del Cobre, or Copper Canyon, up close, though the opportunity to eat some proper food is for many as good a reason as any.

A Moon Rises Over Smokestacks: The moon makes its first appearance above Divisadero at around five o'clock in the afternoon, appearing above the canyon through the smoke from the various homes and comedors. Divisadero is perched above Canyon Urique, the largest of the six canyons that comprise the Barranca del Cobre.

The Precipice: Children play near the edge of Canyon Urique as tourists photograph it from its edge. Barranca del Cobre is ultimately both larger and, in some places, deeper than Arizona's Grand Canyon, though its relative inaccessibility to all but the most ardent hikers makes it a good deal more difficult to get a good look at.

An Influx Before the Descent: A large group boards the train at Creel, the last stop before the train leaves the mountains and starts snaking its way across the desert.

Blown-Out and Slowly Emptying: With the late afternoon sun lighting up the cafeteria car windows, the last call for coffees and snacks is issued and people begin making their way back to their seats. Many have been on the train since it left Los Mochis at seven o'clock in the morning. At seven o'clock in the evening, they still have one third of the trip to go.

The Final Climb: As the sun begins to set over the mountains, El Chepe begins its final climb, running along through the forest on top of the range, preparing itself for its rapid descent to the flat and endless desert over a thousand metres below.

Related posts:

1. A Big Blue Watery Road
2. The Spectacle of Tragedy
3. A Sunday Service

The Rabbit Bites is a new weekly column by freelance journalist and critic Matthew Clayfield. Covering a wide array of topics, including politics, international affairs and the arts, it will appear on Disposable Words every Friday.

The inaugural appearance of this column, which will appear here each week over the course of the coming year, comes two days after my arrival back in Sydney from Australia’s El Dorado. Instead of a city made of gold, however, the one I have returned from has been made primarily of iron ore and petroleum. And, instead of being a fable or myth, this city is an accomplished fact. I have seen it growing, rapidly, before my very eyes.

Perth is teeming with construction. Everywhere one looks, a crane. I remember when I visited New York City in 2009, my travelling companion, who had flown in from Beijing, was quick to remark upon the city’s lack of construction compared to China’s urban areas. New money likes to show itself off. And with many of Western Australia’s resources winding up on the Middle Kingdom’s construction sites, the fact that the state is showing off as well should hardly come as much of a surprise.

I was in Perth for a little over a week, my first time in the city in a little over a decade. Even more than the half-built skyscrapers and the skeleton of what will eventually become a thoroughly modern-looking entertainment and sporting complex (all primary colours and abstract shapes, the structure is a statement of the very progress that will render it dated within the decade), what struck me most about the city was the sheer self-confidence of its people. More than merely cashed-up bogans, Perth’s residents struck me as sophisticated, savvy, and fully aware of how important their work is to the rest of the country. If anything, it is the rest of the country’s tendency to think of the state as little more than a source of revenue, and to dismiss its residents as the very cashed-up bogans they are not, that betrays a striking lack of awareness. And a foolish one, too.

While Western Australian secessionism is effectively dead as a viable political movement—it has been thirty-six years since a secessionist ran for state parliament and nearly eighty since the matter was last put to a vote—the isolation and independent-mindedness of the state do occasionally cause the matter to come up. (The vote in question—a state referendum held in 1933 by the pro-secession state government of Sir James Mitchell—saw those in favour of secession win by a margin of two-to-one. However, the state’s subsequent petition for independence was ruled out of order by the British Parliament, on the grounds that the request had not come from the Commonwealth of Australia but from one of its individual states.)

Delivering the Vista Public Lecture in October 2008, Western Australia’s former premier, Richard Court, said secessionist arguments were only given traction by the federal government’s exploitation of the west and its resources. By 2020, Court argued (while insisting that he was not advocating secession himself), Western Australia could be receiving as little as five per cent of the country’s general revenue assistance payments, despite sporting over ten per cent of the population, contributing nearly ten per cent of GST, and accounting for 36 per cent of the country’s export income. The current Western Australian Minister for Mines and Petroleum, Norman Moore, is himself a keen secessionist, and last year insisted that Federal Labor’s resource super profit tax (today the watered-down minerals resource rent tax) had caused secessionist ”rumblings” across the state. “Everywhere you go,” Moore said, “people are talking about it.”  (Indeed, a quick search reveals a number of Facebook groups supporting Western Australian secession, each with between fifty and two hundred members. The Facebook group for the New South Wales Secession Movement, in contrast, boasts a paltry five.)

As a hypothetical (which it surely must be, given the constitutional illegality of unilateral secession and the unlikelihood that the more dependent states of the east would ever vote in favour of letting the west go), it is worth considering what “devolution” stemming from perceived economic imbalances might look like. (Considering what an Australian Civil War might look like is also a curious exercise.)

If Western Australia was ever to secede from the federation—to become Westralia, say, as Lang Hancock advocated in the 1970s—then it would likely be one of the richest countries per capita in the world. Certainly, it would outperform the country it seceded from, which would suffer accordingly. At $71,055, Western Australia’s GSP per capita easily outdoes the nominal GDP per capita of $45,285 enjoyed by the country as a whole. And given Western Australia’s contribution to the national accounts of some 13.6 per cent of Australia’s GDP between 2008 and 2009, that latter figure could be expected to decline sharply if ever the state was to succeed at seceding.

In The Economist‘s recent special edition, The World in 2011, much was made of the slow and, in some cases, slowly atrophying growth figures of Australia’s “older, more populous states”—Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia—against those of the so-called frontier states of Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. (The latter three are all expected to experience above-average growth this year.) While the article, like many commentators and politicians in the east, framed the current mining boom in terms suggesting it may end at any moment—its message was essentially that we should enjoy the good times “while the luck lasts”—it is worth noting that, on the other side of the continent, optimism rather outweighs caution. As one person who works on an oil rig off the coast pointed out to me at a barbecue: “What we’re experiencing here is not a boom. What we’re experiencing is a boom within a boom.”

In other words, even if the current boom only winds up having the fifteen-year lifespan of its predecessors, the level of demand would still be such that the ensuing bust would be unlikely to ensue. China and India will still need oil, after all, not to mention iron ore and natural gas. But then, anyone making a hundred thousand a year and working only half it would tell themselves that, wouldn’t they?

Illustration by Melanie Cook, a freelance illustrator and cartoonist.

Related posts:

1. The Rabbit Bites: Jingo All the Way
2. The Rabbit Bites: Le Roux’s Endgame
3. The Rabbit Bites: Fear and Loathing in Arizona

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Garbage Bags and iPod Earphones: Travellers wait in the Mazatlán ferry terminal for the departure of the Chihuahua Star, the Baja Ferries vessel that will take them across the Gulf of California to the city of La Paz in the state of Baja California Sur.

Green Stripes: The travellers are preparing for a lengthy trip: the passage from Mazatlán to La Paz is twelve hours long, departing the former city, in the drug-wracked state of Sinaloa, in the late afternoon and arriving in Baja early the next morning.

Lines of Blue, Yellow and White: The view of the Mazatlán docks from the Chihuahua Star. Built in 1989 in the Mitsubishi H.I. shipyards in Japan, the ship is one hundred and eighty-seven metres long and was bought by Baja Ferries in February 2008. It can accommodate twelve hundred passengers and eighteen hundred linear meters of cargo.

Black on Pink: Smoke streams out into the Mazatlán dusk. As the ship readies to depart, a long procession of semi-trailer trucks boards it from the rear, and hundreds of travellers—Mexicans and foreigners alike—take to the deck to watch the process.

Hitting the Deck: Beer in hand, an American man makes his way across the deck to the stern. Many of those making tonight's passage are involved in the Baja 1000, the world-famous off-road race that sees hundreds of motorcycles, buggies, trucks and custom cars race from Ensenada to La Paz, and sometimes back again.

The Moon: Two travellers stand on the Chihuahua Star's upper deck waiting for the boat's departure.

Trucking the Gulf: Two truck drivers stand at the ship's railing waiting for the trip to begin. Although technically still working, most of the drivers spend the whole twelve hours of the passage in the bar, drinking and listening to bad country music all through the night.

Twilight Departure: The sun disappears behind the western horizon as travellers and truck drivers alike await the ship's departure. Although the boat is meant to leave at five, it is closer to six o'clock before its foghorn sounds for the first time.

Nautical Geometry: Twilight renders silhouettes of those still out on the deck as the temperature begins to drop and people start making their way back inside. Most are heading off to eat: the Chihuahua Star sports its own á la carte restaurant and cafeteria, as well as a disco (which is closed for renovations), a piano bar (which has a locked piano), and an arcade (where one of the games ate my coins).

Huddle: A group of women sit together on the deck as the ship begins making its way northwest. They will soon head inside as well: by nine o'clock, the deck is empty of all but the most committed cigarette smokers.

I Got a Nautical-Themed Pashmina Afghan: A truck driver relaxes on a deckchair as the last of the sunlight disappears.

Sunrise in Baja: The sun rises over the state of Baja California Sur as the Chihuahua Star arrives in the Bay of La Paz.

This Boat is Real: With the ship's lifeboats and the undulating hills of Baja behind them, a family emerges from their cabin to watch the ship's arrival in port.

Shadow Travellers: The early morning sun casts the traveller's shadows onto one of the ship's walls.

The California Star: A couple stands on deck as the Chihuahua Star passes its sister ship, the California Star, in the bay. Built in 2001 in the Candiere Navale Visentini shipyards in Italy, the California Star is one hundred and eighty-six metres long and was bought by Baja Ferries in 2003. It can carry nine hundred passengers and two thousand linear meters of cargo.

Red Dot Morning: A woman watches as the morning sun hits a row of horizontal petrol tanks on shore.

Morning Has Broken: Inside one of the Chihuahua Star's two sleeping halls—which are curiously named for Picasso and Dali—people begin to wake up and get their things together. Between them, the two halls can accommodate four hundred and eighty-seven passengers.

Heave: A dock worker fastens the Chihuahua Star to the shore. Despite the trip being advertised as twelve hours long, we have now been on the boat for nearly fourteen and a half.

It's a Big Blue Watery Road: The Baja Ferries logo looms large over the silhouetted passengers disembarking the Chihuahua Star.

A Rightward Tungsten Blur: The stern of the California Star veers towards the Baja Ferries dock in Topolobampo, Sinaloa. The site of a radical utopian colony from roughly 1884 to 1894, Topolobampo's other claim to fame is that it boasts the second largest natural deepwater port in the world.

Dots and Dashes in Indigo: A long exposure time transforms stars into mid-air em-dashes as the California Star enters the port of Topolobampo. Of the two passages that run out of La Paz, this is easily the shorter, taking a mere six hours.

I'm On a Boat: A traveller watches Baja California recede from sight as the California Star makes its way across the gulf that gives it its name.

Related posts:

1. A Sunday Service
2. The Other Train
3. The Spectacle of Tragedy

It had done so for the earlier anniversary, cancelling the traditional eleven o’clock grito—the annual ringing of a bell in the town’s main square accompanied by cries of “Viva Mexico!”—out of fear of possible cartel-related violence. The next day, a photographer from the city’s main newspaper, El Diario, was gunned down on his lunch break, prompting the paper’s editorial staff to write an unprecedented open letter to the city’s cartels headlined: “What do you want from us?”

But instead of scaling down the November 20 celebrations, Juárez’s new leadership team scaled up security instead. (Héctor Murguía, who served as mayor between 2004 and 2007, was sworn in again on October 10, at the beginning of what would become the bloodiest month in the city’s history.)

The school, civic and religious groups represented in the annual parade were heavily guarded by the city’s ubiquitous security forces, with patrols of federal police prowling the streets in their black utility vehicles and snipers dotting the roofs of the buildings that lined the route. With so many gun-toting, balaclava-clad federal police and army troops on the streets, Juárez can sometimes feel as though it is operating under martial law.

Following President Felipe Calderón’s declaration of war on the cartels in December 2006, troop numbers along the northern border have exploded into the tens of thousands. More than 29,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the ensuing four years, with execution-style killings, ritual beheadings, and massacres at teen parties and drug rehabilitation clinics all disconcertingly common.

Among the trove of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks this month were a number that revealed growing concern among both US and Mexican officials that the current strategy is not working and that the country runs the risk of losing entire regions to cartel rule.

It is the military’s presence in Juárez, however, as much as the threat of violence, that partly accounts for the weirdly muted, airless quality of the city’s streets. According to a report released last month by the Washington Office on Latin America, a number of soldiers have been accused of human rights violations against citizens, with over four thousand reports of rape, robbery, forced disappearance and extrajudicial killings over the past four years. Asked what he thinks of the military presence in the city, one cab driver squirmed: “It is unpleasant but necessary.”

To the extent that it is necessary it can also be reassuring: according to reports, hundreds more locals showed up for the weekend’s events than attended either the bicentenary celebrations of earlier this year or those marking the anniversary of Revolution at the end of last.

And indeed the events were charming enough: school children dancing in traditional garb, mariachi bands, local crooners. What was really winsome, however, was the high esteem in which those present held their city and their willingness to go ahead with events despite the risks.

Nelia, one of the event’s organisers, was surprised to see westerners at Plaza Benito Juárez, where the post-parade festivities were taking place. “I didn’t think we were supposed to get tourists in Juárez anymore,” she joked.

She said Juarenses had been given a new sense of confidence by the election of Murguía, whose speeches tend to emphasise economic development over Calderón’s increasingly controversial—some would say discredited—military approach to the cartels. Indeed, when the mayor made a brief appearance at the concert, locals scrambled to shake his hand and have their photos taken with him.

Asked if she was scared of the possibility of violence at the event, Nelia openly scoffed. “No,” she said as a group of schoolchildren dressed as cowboys took to the stage. “I refuse to be scared by my own city.”

Others, however, were not so certain. Charlie, a teacher at a local language school, described life in the city as “terrible”. “When you go out in morning,” he said, “you never know if you’re going to come back.”

He said in addition to drug-related violence—authorities predict that three thousand people will be murdered in the city this year, easily outdoing last year’s own record-breaking bumper crop—one now had to worry about extortion and kidnapping too.

“It’s not even a drug thing a lot of the time,” Charlie said. “There are copycat threats as well from people who have nothing to do with the cartels at all.” He said the school he teaches at has been forced to close due to threats of violence and intimidation on more than one occasion.

David, a Chicago-born American who has lived in Juárez for three years, said locals’ feelings about the city were complex, at once both fearful and proud, as well as fiercely protective. He said while most concede that the city’s reputation as the murder capital of the world is deserved—”Everyone knows at least one person who has been killed in the violence,” he said—they also maintain that the predominant media narrative about the place is often incomplete.

“People are extremely proud of this city and very much love it in ways that no one from the outside can really understand,” David said at the Museum of the Revolution on the Frontier, which was opened as part of the weekend’s celebrations. “Of course, the violence affects everyone and is part of the fabric of daily life, but everyone here wants someone to notice that Juárez and Jurenses are more than that.”

What they are, he said, is resilient. “What is really fascinating is the way people try to continue to maintain a normal life despite the violence. We go to school, we go to work, and we do it even though we’re all probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

While he conceded that there was something refreshing about Murguía’s arguments—the mayor likes to stress the US responsibility to Juárez to curb the insatiable demand for drugs that drives the whole sordid business—David also said that it was worth remembering that the mayor’s opponents have previously accused him of having links to drug traffickers and that four hundred of the city’s police officers had to be fired following his first reign as mayor, after they failed confidence exams consisting of drug and polygraph tests.

“It makes a lot of sense not to listen to the politicians down here,” he said.

However, Murguía nevertheless managed to bring members his audience to tears when he spoke in front of the museum moments later. Reminding them of the importance of Juárez to the Mexican Revolution—and therefore, he said, to Mexican freedom— the mayor led the onlookers in the grito they missed out on two months prior: “Viva Juárez! Viva Chihuahua! Viva Mexico!”

By six o’clock, however, the streets were empty again and any signs that a crowd had been gathered in them had all but disappeared. Juarenses may love their city in spite of the bloodshed it has seen, but it is precisely because of that bloodshed that they know better than to be outside after dark.

An edited version of this article appeared under the title ‘A town kicks against cartel rule’ in The Weekend Australian on Saturday, December 11, 2010. That version is accessible here.

Related posts:

1. In Broad Daylight
2. Mexican Bicentenary II: Fireworks Fiesta
3. Drug Wars I: A Tapestry of Murder

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

—

The Prowl: Tourists watch from behind a small foothill as actors playing US Border Patrol authorities scour the area for them. Shining torches into the bushes and wielding bullhorns, the actors shout into the darkness twice: once in English to alienate the tourists and then again in Spanish to make sure they understand. "Mexicans! We know you can hear us! If you don't turn yourselves in now you will go to prison for some years! We have Mexican food for you! We have quesadillas and tamales!"

The Huddle: The opening moments of the walk are at once both exciting and nerve-wracking, with the sound of police sirens shattering the relative silence of the night almost immediately after the group has set out. Huddling behind foothills and pieces of corrugated iron, the tourist-indocumentados giggle nervously and shoosh those who are giggling, while others move about restlessly as they try to find a comfortable position. The group usually consists of around fifteen to twenty people, but tonight, because it is a long weekend, it is significantly larger. But even a group as large this one is prone to go almost completely silent when the authorities begin to shine lights in its direction.

Organised Chaos: One of the Border Patrol officers is almost upon the tourist-indocumentados when the head coyote leaps up and screams: "Run!" What follows are two minutes of organised chaos as everyone jumps the corrugated iron fence and starts running down the road. What is striking and unexpected is the violence of the stampede: the actors playing the authorities tackle those playing the coyotes to the ground—or is that one trying to thrash his way out of an officer's embrace actually one of the tourists—with a ferocity that almost seems excessive.

A Helping Hand: After climbing down a steep embankment from the road, the group begins to make its way through a muddy section of riverbank. This is where the true nature of the walk begins to make itself known: this is not going to be an easy evening or even a particularly pleasant one. While more than several people wind up shin-deep in mud, one or two others fare even worse, twisting their ankles as they attempt to leap from one patch of dry land to the next.

Subcomandante: A woman and her son make their way along the riverbank. Uncommon except on long weekends and holidays, a large number of children are on the walk this evening.

Going Under When Over Would Be So Much Easier: One of the coyotes holds up a barbed-wire fence for one of the tourist-indocumentados to crawl under. The walk is littered with natural and man-made obstacles for the group to overcome: in addition to navigating the muddy riverbank and climbing under fences, the tourist-indocumentados are also forced to crawl through a narrow, pitch black storm drain and balance their way across a river on logs.

Captured: At times, the walk feels like a strange cross between a forced hike and dinner theatre, with staged events taking place at intervals along the route. While the tourist-indocumentados cower in a nearby thicket, a group of actor-indocumentados is captured by the authorities and grilled for information.

Negotiation: The group of actors is encouraged to turn in the group of tourists.

Indian Camp Camp: After the tourist-indocumentados have entered the United States, the evening's strangest and most distracting event takes place: a meeting with Native Americans. Played by Mexicans dressed as Hollywood-style Indians, these so-called natives welcome the tourist-indocumentados to their country before choosing a female member of the audience to become their chieftain's queen. After adorning the girl with a feathered headdress, they proceed to pose with her for photographs. Parque EcoAlberto is in reality over five hundred kilometres from the US-Mexico border.

In Memoriam: The evening ends with a tribute to Mexico's real indocumentados, who have been forced to try for a better life across the border because they are less well off than the tourists who have spent the evening pretending to walk in their shoes. "We should always be thankful," the head coyote tells the group as he finally removes his balaclava, "that we are not in a position where migration is our only option." He leads the group in a rendition of the country's national anthem while the candles flicker behind him in the wind.

Related posts:

1. Migration II: Boarding the Beast
2. Migration III: The Good Shepherd
3. Migration I: Waiting On the Arriaga-Ixtepec

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Bandera: A giant Mexican flag billows over San Cristóbal de las Casas in the central highlands of Chiapas.

Cancún on the Rocks: Swimmers at Playa Tortugas near Cancún's Zona Hotelera.

The Beautiful and Damned: Western tourists—Cancún's bread and butter—enjoy the mid-afternoon sun off Playa Tortugas. Somewhat defeating the purpose of the vessel, the tourists are not anchored very far out: when one of them needs to go back to shore, he merely lowers himself in the water and walks. It turns out it only comes up to his waist.

A Farewell to Carmen: A truck begins to make its way across Puente El Zacatal in the state of Campeche. Spanning the Gulf of Campeche's Laguna de Términos, the 3,861-metre bridge connects the Isla del Carmen to Mexico's mainland.

Platform Supply Vessels at Twilight: Residents of Ciudad del Carmen sit at the city's malecón, the lights of anchored PSVs flickering across the Laguna de Términos. Until the 1970s, Ciudad del Carmen was a small fishing town, with shrimp its primary industry. When oil was discovered in a nearby section of the Gulf, the fishing stopped and the town exploded: Pemex and a number of foreign companies moved in. Accordingly, Ciudad del Carmen is today home to one of the largest populations of Texan expatriates in Mexico.

Evening on the Esplanade: Talking advantage of the clear evening, locals and the city's few tourists alike take to the malecón to watch as night falls.

The Greatship Dhriti: Currently on a two-year charter to the Gulf of Mexico, the 2.2-tonne, 73.6-metre Greatship Dhriti is registered under the Indian flag in the port of Mumbai. It can carry 1200m³ of marine gas oil for fuel, as well 800m³ of fresh water, 900m³ of drill water, 980m³ of mud, 390m³ of brine, and 200m³ of base oil. Sometimes people make out in front of it.

Los Revheads Mexicanos: We were passing through Tuxtla Gutiérrez, a city of a little over a million people in the Depression of Chiapas, making our way to San Cristóbal de las Casas when our bus pulled into a estación de autobuses with a car park full of teenagers and their pimped-out cars. All wing doors and customised sub-woofer installations, a number of the vehicles had trophies placed before them on the asphalt: these were award-winning rides.

The Moon and the Naked Flame: Onlookers take photographs as one of Tuxtla Gutiérrez's customised cars literally backfires.

A Morning in Chiapas: To get to Tapachula, where we put together our series on el Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor de Pobre y el Migrante, we first had to drive from San Cristóbal de las Casas through the mountains of Chiapas. The seven-hour marathon weaved through rainforests and ran along pebble-bottomed rivers, hugging the Guatemalan border tight until depositing us finally on the Pacific coast. We listened to Rachmaninoff. This photograph was taken at the beginning of the journey, in one of the roadside villages outside San Cristóbal.

The Eagle and the Serpent: With the twin spires of la Catedral Basílica Menor de la Inmaculda Concepción rising above it, the rotunda in Durango's zócalo also sports a three-dimensional representation of the country's coat of arms. The Golden Eagle devouring a snake while perched upon a prickly pear cactus, while seemingly a simple representation of good triumphing over evil, actually has ancient religious connotations. When they were not yet an empire but still a wandering tribe, the Aztecs were told, by numerous ancient texts, to watch for an eagle devouring something while perched on a prickly pear (precisely what it was supposed to be devouring varied from text to text). They were to build their city—which they called Tenochtitlan—on that spot. Today it is known as Ciudad de México.

A Broken Saviour: Like many in Mesoamerica's lower-lying regions, Ciudad del Carmen's cemetery is above ground: the town's average elevation of a single metre renders proper burial impossible. As a result, the cemetery is a small city of stacked sarcophagi, with each tower seven or eight feet high. With peeling stucco and dead flowers the norm, an amputee Christ, without even a cross to hang on, is very much of a piece with its surrounds.

El Padre de la Patria: Just before midnight on September 15, 1810, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla addressed his congregation from the steps of his church in the small town of Dolores in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. "Death to bad government!" Hidalgo cried, in what later became known as el Grito de Dolores. The next morning, the priest's revolutionary army marched on the region's capital, marking the beginning of the Mexican War of Independence. With the spires of his church behind him, Hidalgo today stands, commemorated in bronze, atop a monument in the town's zócalo. The town is now named Delores Hidalgo.

El Lugar del Grito: Residents of Dolores Hidalgo sit outside the front of the church from which Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla issued the Grito de Dolores in 1810, while a man in the courtyard rings the church's bells with the aid of a very long rope.

On Zapatista Chic: British tourists turn down the offer of handmade scarves outside la Catedral de San Cristóbal de Las Casas. The city is a very popular tourist destination: elderly genteel types, interested in the cobble-stoned streets of the country's older colonial cities, brush shoulders with dreadlocked peaceniks who sits on the those same cobble-stoned streets smoking pot and playing acoustic guitar. Mostly comprising western, twenty-something anti-globalisation types, this latter group has primarily been drawn to the city by the romantic allure of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas, whose likenesses can be seen throughout the city's numerous souvenir stores, adorning tee-shirts and free-trade coffee mugs. Like that of Che, these images lose all meaning when they become commodities, the irony being that those who buy them are usually also seeking to bring about the end of global capitalism.

The Prophet Remembered: A bust of Lev Davidovich Bronstein—better known to the world as Leon Trotsky—sits in the the Museo Casa de León Trotsky in the Coyacán district of Ciudad de México. Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky settled in Mexico in 1937. After living with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the famous Casa Azur for several years—the house is now the stunning Museo Frida Kahlo—Trotsky moved to his compound on Avenida Viena in 1939, where he was murdered with an ice axe in his study the following year. The house is now the site of the museum.

As Hard As the Soviet Hammer and as Bent as the Sickle that Crosses It: A tourist photographs Trotsky's mausoleum. The ashes of both revolutionary and his wife, Natalia Sedova, are buried in the compound's garden, which the former considered his pride and joy: in between writing numerous books, including his autobiography, Trotsky excelled at growing vegetables and raising animals on the property. "Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and forever."

Can You Hear the Guns, Durango?: The gallows and sheriff's office in Chupaderos, a Western movie set about ten kilometres north of Durango. A number of Hollywood Westerns, television series and commercials were filmed here between the 1950s and the early 2000s, including Comanche, A Man Named Horse and several episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger. After production dried up for good, the locals moved in, occupying not only the structurally sound buildings but also those that are only fronts: while the saloon is now a convenience store, the food and seed store's front door leads directly into a chicken coup.

That's Not a Knife, This Is a Knife: A Chupaderos local brandishes a small knife, which he will proceed to attack his slightly older brother with. One can't help but feel that the town would have been a fabulous one to grow up in: what better place to play Cowboys & Indians than on a Western film set abandoned by Hollywood? Horses still ride by occasionally, but now they're ridden by locals on their way from one side of town to the other.

Sunset Steps in Chiapas: The steps leading up to la Iglesia Santo Domingo in San Cristóbal de las Casas.

Sunrise Steps in Guanajuato: The steps leading down to Guanajuato's city centre.

A Quartet of Benches: Guanajuato at dawn. With a population of a little over 150,000, the city is located in a narrow valley several hundred kilometres north of Ciudad de México, its geography resulting in some of the most fascinating hair-bend turns and winding alleyways in the country.

Kite Circuit: Guanajuato's candy-coloured buildings.

Strays and Wires and an Early Morning Walker: Guanajuato begins to stir to life.

Eternal Serenade: A bronze mariachi outside el Teatro Juárez de Guanajuato croons to a passer-by.

Here Comes the Sun: A father carries his daughter's backpack as he walks her to school in Guanajuato.

Related posts:

1. Mexcellaneous Vol. 1
2. Mexican Bicentenary III: The Military Parade
3. Six Death Sun Shield

” The Mexican … is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favourite toys and his most steadfast love.” — Octavio Paz

There are skulls in the presidential palace. They belong to country’s founding fathers and have been moved here from la Columna de la Independencia, where they usually reside in a mausoleum at the structure’s base, for the last couple of months of the year. It takes me a moment to realise what I’m looking at or, rather, looking into: Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla’s head is two hundred and fifty-seven years old and its eye sockets are enormous. It is sitting in a mahogany box, which is dark and varnished and behind glass, atop of a couple of other random pieces of the so-called father of the nation’s remains. I think one of the pieces is a femur or something. The wooden box is accompanied by three others. These contain what’s left of the skulls of Ignacio Allende, José María Morelos y Pavón and Juan Aldama. One of them is little more than a skullcap-shaped piece of crown—forgive the pun—and a sliver of lower jaw. Other glass cabinets line the walls, all of them containing perfectly preserved fragments of centuries-old bone. All in all, I figure I am surrounded by the mortal remains of maybe fourteen or fifteen independence leaders and revolutionaries. The base, material nature of these calcium deposits seems to fly in the face of the near-religious veneration of the national icons they once belonged to, proving that these figures were made of the same stuff as the rest of us. Not that I’m thinking about this right now, of course. I’m too busy staring into the holes where somebody’s eyes used to be and now aren’t. People move about around me as though there is nothing unusual about any of this. But then, of course, in Mexico there isn’t. Death, here, is stock-standard stuff: it is familiar, it is everyday, and it is everywhere.

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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The Marionettes of Mixquic: San Andrés Mixquic, a small community to the south-east of Ciudad de México, is famous for its el Día de los Muertos celebrations. In the town's zócalo, children are shown how to work skeletal marionettes that, back from the dead, drink and dance and live their annual evening back on earth to the full.

Pulling the Strings: A group of Mixquic children operate the marionettes. Families construct elaborate rigs and bring them to the zócalo for the evening, depicting death undertaking a variety of activities, from vegetable gardening to horseback riding and train robbery.

On the Puppet Masters' Perch: Onlookers fill the zócalo, watching the marionettes and listening to local brass bands. A little before midnight, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu is screened with live accompaniment by a local rock band.

The World in Several Hundred Thousand Grains of Sand: El Centenario de la Revolución Mexicana meets el Día de los Muertos in a municipal building, which is transformed for the evening by an army of paper mâché skeletons sporting rifles and sombreros and a large sand mural commemorating the anniversary.

Blow Out: A street performer wraps up a show of fire juggling and hula hooping in the zócalo.

In Guanajuato, one can visit the Museo de Momia, where the mummified remains of hundreds of people dug up from the local cemetery—including babies—are on display. (The relatives of the cadavers were unable to pay rent on the graves.) We have visited more places where people were killed in this country than we have places where people achieved great things: Trotsky’s study, where he received an ice axe to the head; Hacienda Chinameca, where Zapata was shot; the railway tracks near San Miguel de Allende, where Neal Cassady is said to have died one drunken evening while counting sleepers on his way out of town. (According to local and literary legend, his last words were: “Sixty-four thousand nine-hundred and twenty-eight.”) Death is splashed across the headlines here and not only because of the cartels up north: every local rag sports a weekly lift-out of police stories, with every instance of death from car accident to cardiac arrest depicted in close-up photographic detail. And then there is el Día de los Muertos, the night when families stake out the graves of loved ones whose spirits are said to come back to remember what it felt like to be alive and to live, summoned, like those restless souls in Fantasia‘s famous final sequence, back from the other side.

The Cemetery: Hundreds of people—locals and tourists alike—pack the cemetery behind Mixquic's Church of San Andres Apostal. The air thick with copal incense and the gravestones bright with floral arrangements, the church grounds will remain aglow in candlelight long after those not keeping vigil until dawn have retired, affording those who are staying on some peace.

Hollow-Eyed Girl: El Día de los Muertos celebrations begin on October 28 and continue until November 2, coinciding with Halloween. Children make the very most of this, trick-or-treating more or less from the time the holiday season starts right through to the vigil on its final night.

Shadow Crucifix: A Mixquic woman lights a candle at the grave of a loved one, which has been elaborately decorated with flower petals arranged in the shape of a crucifix. While religious designs predominate, one is liable to stumble upon the occasional death-themed or skull-shaped arrangement, too.

Headstones: Festooned with flower petals and burnt-down candles, a series of grinning representations of death adorn the large grave site in the centre of the cemetery.

So That Our Sins May Be Forgiven: A family, a few of its members perched on the cemetery wall, keeps vigil at the grave of a loved one.

A Toy Without a Child: A woman looks upon the grave of a child that has not only been decorated with the standard-issue flower petals and candles, but also with a toy car. One of the most striking things about the cemetery is the number of children buried in it.

Vigil: A Mixquic resident sits graveside.

Late Mourning: The dome of the Church of San Andres Apostal looming behind them in the darkness, a young boy and an old woman sit together alongside a grave that sports a particularly elaborate, skull-shaped floral arrangement.

Spirited Away: Copal incense fills the air in the front section of the church cemetery.

Mother and Son: Unlike those of some other countries, Mexican children are not urged to shy away from death, but rather play an active role in el Día de los Muertos celebrations (not merely those aspects of the holiday that have been influenced by Halloween, either.) Indeed, there are countless toddlers and young children at the cemetery, decorating graves, lighting candles, and keeping vigil with the adults. At least when they're not busy trick-or-treating.

The Middens: A pile of bones sits beneath a crucifix as part of a display in the inner courtyard of the church complex.

If this seems at all morbid to certain tastes, it is perhaps worth remembering that taste is cultural. In fact, after a few months in this country, one might be forgiven for feeling that there’s actually something much healthier about the Mexican’s relationship with death—or at least, with certain aspects of it—than there is about the Anglo-American’s. Pretending that death doesn’t exist in order that one might avoid thinking or talking about it merely affords it unwarranted power: that of the taboo. The Mexican, by contrast, refuses to be owned by death, refuses to be consumed by it: rather, he raises himself up to its level, looks it directly in the eye, and, finding he is no longer afraid, is able to do the same with life.

Related posts:

1. Don’t Fear the Reaper
2. A Sunday Service
3. The Other Train

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Images of the Saints: Bringing their representations of Santa Muerte with them—statues, paintings, posters, tattoos—Tepito locals flock to el Santuario de la Santísima Muerte for the monthly veneration of the saint. On the first day of every month, Enriqueta Romero Romero, the sanctuary's founder, leads worshippers in a saying of the Rosary, which lasts for about an hour.

The Family That Prays Together, Stays Together: A Tepito family stands with their small collection of icons. Today's gathering is particularly important: people are here, not only for the monthly veneration of Santa Muerte, but also the ninth anniversary of the sanctuary, which was the first of its kind. It consists of a public altar and a life-sized representation of Santa Muerte, both visible from the street, the latter wearing a bridal gown and festooned with pieces of jewellery presented as offerings over the years by the faithful.

The Tepito Congregation: Roughly five thousand people attend the annual anniversary of the sanctuary. Instead of incense, the air is thick with marijuana smoke—some particularly potent local strand if the bloodshot eyes of the smokers are anything to go by—and, instead of Holy water, the streets are wet with Corona and Don Julio. The faithful feed their alcohol to the statues, tipping bottles up against skeletal grins and watching the contents run down empty rib cages.

Grim: Worshippers stand against the wall opposite the sanctuary during the saying of the Rosary. Although the praying goes for an hour, and although the Rosary, by its nature, is very repetitive, the faithful never once flag: their voices remain strong, and they remain standing, for the full sixty minutes.

Rapture: One of the faithful, Santa Muerta at his breast, looks to the heavens during the saying of the Rosary.

Flossy Reapers: Statues of Santa Muerte clothed in pink—representations of the figure are characterised by their elaborate, often garish, garb—stand together in a group.

Cigar and Scythe: A giant spliff protruding from his mouth, a Tepito local stands with his back to the setting sun. His Santa Muerte's home-made scythe has been built out of wire and tape.

Herbal Offerings: Clad in a Santa Muerte tee-shirt and sporting another representation of the figure on his arm, one of the faithful delicately deposits a handful of marijuana buds before a statue of the saint.

You Think You Know Fashion: A huge number of the faithful—more of them than not, in fact—sport items of clothing and tattoos depicting Santa Muerte's image, further suggesting the centrality of the figure to daily life here in Tepito.

Trick-or-Treat: November 1 is not only the anniversary of el Santuario de la Santísima Muerte: it also the day after Halloween and the day before el Día de los Muertos. Mexican children benefit hugely from the six-day celebration that culminates on November 2, appearing in costume from October 28 and trick-or-treating everywhere they can until the holiday season is over. They approach random people on the street and couples dining at tables in restaurants. And they are happy to accept money when candy is not forthcoming.

Related posts:

1. A Sunday Service
2. Rehearsing Revolution
3. Mexican Bicentenary III: The Military Parade

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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One Leg in the Distance: El Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor de Pobre y el Migrante. In the foreground, the shelter's sewing workshop, one of several areas in the complex dedicated to further education and the development of practical skills. (The sewing workshop produces sheets, blankets and pillowcases for the shelter's dormitories, as well as for outside sale. English and computer classes are also available to residents.) In the background, Fidelina, one of the shelter's current residents, sits in the fading light of day. Our guide, Elmir, a volunteer who was educated in the United States but originally hails from Cancún, says the shelter houses anywhere between thirty to fifty people at any given time and costs nearly one hundred thousand pesos to operate each month, with sales from the sewing workshop and on-site bakery providing "very little but enough to help". "We're not dependent on the government," he says. "We mostly get by on donations."

Amiel: On June 23, Amiel hopped a freight train north from the south-eastern state of Tabasco, where many indocumentados have been beginning their journey since Hurricane Stan destroyed the line between Tapachula and Arriaga in 2004. But instead of making it to his next destination, the twenty-year-old Honduran fell, damaging his leg in the process. He had it removed a month a later and has been recovering at the shelter ever since. "Emotionally it's been hard," Amiel says. "I have learned a lot about life."

Crucifijo Blanco: El Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor's on-site bakery. The crucifix on the wall is one of the few signs we see in the complex of the shelter's religious roots. Having experienced a number of serious illnesses in her own life, Olga Sánchez Martínez, the shelter's founder, started visiting Central American migrants in hospital after they had fallen from the various freight trains north or else found themselves the victims of criminal violence. Realising how vulnerable these indocumentados were, and believing it was God's wish that she help them, Doña Olga, as she is affectionately known, started begging in the street to raise funds for the medicines, crutches and other necessities the migrants could not afford themselves. Having cared for a number of indocumentados in her own home over the years, Doña Olga established el Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor in 1999. Elmir insists that the shelter's vision is more ecumenical and humanist than it is strictly Catholic, however. "We certainly don't discriminate," he says.

The Best Doughnuts This Side of the Guatemalan Border: The shelter's on-site bakery produces bread for the residents and doughnuts for sale. Elmir tells us that he spends much of his time outside the shelter peddling the bakery's wares on street corners.

A Communal Dinner: Bread rolls from the bakery are passed around at the five o'clock dinner service. Residents enjoy three meals a day, with the majority of the shelter's foodstuffs donated by local businesses. The same is true of much else in the complex: the medicine boxes in the well-stocked clinic, which is manned by a single nurse but no doctor, have all been donated, as have the crutches, wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs used by many of the residents.

Six Wheels: While the rest of the residents eat at the main table, Fidelina sits quietly at the window, eating by herself. Behind her is Allen Cheng, an elderly stroke-victim who arrived at the shelter eighteen months ago, unable to speak and suffering from amnesia. He claims now to be a Canadian citizen, though he still can't remember if he has family in that that country and certainly has no documentation to prove to the authorities he's from there himself. He describes the effects of the stroke—which he can't remember either—as a "total bye-bye". He is one of a number of foreign nationals to have passed through the shelter: this year, a US citizen spent seven months in residence, while a French victim of assault spent part of February recovering at the complex.

Julio: Julio arrived at el Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor the day before our visit, less than a week after he was attacked in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, a key destination for those heading north. The thirty-one-year-old El Salvadoran was loitering around the tracks, waiting to hop the train next train north, when he was stabbed in the back, the wound puncturing a lung. He turned to discover three men armed with machetes, with which they proceeded to attack his face. Instinctively, Julio lifted a hand to defend himself and grabbed one of the machetes before it could strike him. His hand is now criss-crossed with aggressively stitched scars.

Scars: Julio continued to defend himself against his aggressors, but became scared when he felt his legs giving way beneath. "I started running when I realised I was going to die," he says. Bleeding from his face, back and arms, and struggling to breathe, Julio made his way to a local bar, where the proprietors called the police and ambulance. He was rushed to Juchitán de Zaragoza, about forty minutes away, and was relocated to Tapachula after his condition had stabled. Despite his wounds, Julio maintains that he will attempt to reach the United States again once he has fully recovered. "Life in El Salvador is too hard," he says. He will take exactly the same route.

Eliseo: Sixty-year-old Eliseo has lived at el Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor for eleven months, arriving not long after he started going blind a year ago. Working at a Mexican furniture company in order to bankroll his eventual move to Canada, Eliseo had an accident that alerted his employers to his decaying eyesight. The El Salvadoran consulate was notified and he's been living at the shelter ever since.

The Weaver: Eliseo now spends his day weaving baskets, a task as reliant on repetition as it is on vision. While he says he misses El Salvador, he also insists that he can't go back. Before losing ninety-five percent of his eyesight, Eliseo was proficient at carpentry and construction work and had worked as a driver. Now, he says, no employer would have him. "It would be shameful to go back with less than I came away with," he says.

Taking Pride in One's Work: Eliseo shows off one of his many baskets, his threadbare bed behind him. With an optometrist appointment scheduled for next month, he insists that el Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor is the best place for him, at least for the time being. "If I knew I could get medical attention in El Salvador, I would go back," he says. "But I know that will never happen." He's not staying in Mexico because he can get the best help here, but because he can get help, period.

Off-White and Green: A resident eyes the camera from the dining room window while Fidelina sits in the middle of the yard, watching a soapy telenovela through the door of the television room.

We'll Become Silhouettes When Our Bodies Finally Go: Eliseo appears in the doorway of his dormitory, viewed through a veil of wire meshing that serves as both the room's window and its curtain. "He doesn't see people anymore," Elmir tells us. "He only sees shadows."

Fidelina: While nine out of ten of the shelter's residents are migrants, the occasional local makes her home here, too. Fidelina is one such local: after losing her leg to gangrene three months ago—a leg, she says, she sometimes still feels—her family decided the best place for her was somewhere she could get proper help.

Symbolic Reminders: A wheelbarrow and a bag of concrete, a reminder that the shelter is an eternal and underfunded work-in-progress—a shed out the back is to become another dorm, we are told, and has been set to become one for quite some time now—sit next to a single crutch, left behind, perhaps, by the room's last resident.

An Early Night: One of el Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor's residents makes his way back to the male dormitories as the sun lights up the eastern wall of the complex. Everyone begins to disappear from the courtyard not long after dinner has finished, retiring to either the television room or their beds, waiting for night to fall.

Related posts:

1. Mexican Bicentenary III: The Military Parade
2. Migration I: Waiting On the Arriaga-Ixtepec
3. Migration II: Boarding the Beast

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Departure Time Unknown: Estuardo sits on the train tracks with the Arriaga-Ixtepec freight train in the background. The day has finally arrived for him and the other migrants to head north, although no one knows when that might happen. The train arrived at five o'clock yesterday evening but, despite a lot of movement at the station, has shown no sign of leaving this morning or even this afternoon.

In the Shadow of the Hoppers: Two indocumentados relax alongside the stationary railway cars that later, when the train finally shows some sign of moving, they will scramble up in search of the safest and most comfortable seats.

Gra(in): Three indocumentados lean against one of the grain hoppers, taking advantage of the shade they provide. Unlike the rest of Chiapas, which is Mexico's most mountainous state, Arriaga is only fifty-five metres above sea level and the days here are hot and long.

The Man from Chiapas Mayab: A railway employee stands at the door of the Arriaga station.

My Sweet Embraceable You: For much of the week we are in Arriaga, the vast majority of the indocumentados we meet are men. That begins to change after the arrival of the train, when more and more women—along with children the most vulnerable of those heading north—begin to appear on the tracks. Although measures have been introduced to improve protection for female migrants and unaccompanied children on the route, these groups still remain highly susceptible to sexual assault and people trafficking, often at the hands of public officials. Some believe the problem to be even greater than official data would suggest, with many women reluctant to report or talk about sexual violence.

El Niño Cocinero: A four-year-old Guatemalan boy, his mother watching him as he plays, gathers unique-looking rocks and tufts of grass, which he labels as though they were types of food. A rounded stone becomes "una naranja," an orange; another is "una fresa," a strawberry. A discarded bottle cap becomes a cup of "leche," milk, which he proudly presents to his mother for her to drink.

El Niño Camarero: The little boy presents his mother with a plate of "food". She happily plays along, pretending to eat the assorted miscellany and reacting positively to how well it has been prepared.

On the Move: Two indocumentados sit atop one of the boxcars, waiting for the train to leave.

The Search: It is late afternoon when a number of freight cars are rolled across the bridge and in toward the station, sparking a frantic scramble for seats. Estuardo walks along the length of the train, seeking out the best position.

Which Way?: Estuardo contemplates whether to investigate the boxcars ahead or turn back the way he came. He wants to find a carriage with something for him to hold on to (the wind on top of the carriages is intense enough when they're stationary, let alone when they're going forty to fifty kilometres an hour). He also wants to make sure that he's with a group of migrants he feels safe with.

Selection Criteria: Estuardo heads towards a tank car to see if there is any room for another passenger. He road-tests three of four potential carriages before selecting one he is happy to ride on.

Onwards and Upwards: Estuardo climbs aboard one of the train's tank carriages.

The Twelve-Hour Perch: One of the reasons seat selection is so important is that the migrants won't be able to move or change position for another twelve hours. The journey is a long and labourious one: the bus ride between Arriaga and Ixtepec, by contrast, takes a quarter of the time.

For Dear Life: Estuardo and his travelling companions sit atop their tank car waiting for their journey to begin.

Agua: From the moment the indocumentados start climbing aboard the train, local vendors walk up and down its length, selling food and water. The migrants that have spent most of their week begging on the side of the road are able to stock up on provisions, though others deliberately choose not to. Estuardo's backpack contains only a sweater and a bottle of water: if other migrants ask him for food, he explains, he will be able to tell them honestly that he doesn't have any and perhaps avoid harassment.

En Masse: As the sun sets on Arriaga, the indocumentados prepare for the long night ahead—and for the long couple of weeks that will follow it. While in many cases—Estuardo's and Andres's among them—the nervousness that characterised the previous evening has given way to a sense of excitement, it remains that the odds are against the migrants ever reaching their destinations. In a June 2009 report, Mexico's Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos estimated that as many as 9,758 migrants were kidnapped in a six-month period between 2008 and 2009, including one hundred and fifty-seven women and at least fifty-seven children. Almost all of these kidnappings took place along the various train tracks heading north and a great many of them involved the cooperation of public officials.

Skipping Silhouette: The risk of being detained by immigration officials remains at least as great as the threat of kidnapping. In 2009, 58,681 Central Americans were detained by Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Migración and voluntarily repatriated or deported. With no accurate statistics on the number of indocumentados who enter Mexico in the first place, however, it is difficult to estimate how many of those we have met will ever make it to the northern border.

Waiting in the Half-Light: As the last of the sunlight disappears, the stationmaster is finally able to give us a departure time: at ten o'clock, he says, the train will be leaving. Though that is still three or four hours away, most of the indocumentados choose to stay on top of the train. The idea of giving up one's seat or, worse, missing the train altogether is at this point unimaginable.

The Beast at Twilight: The train has been moving up and down the tracks all day, pushing and pulling the various boxcars, tank cars and hoppers into place for the evening's service. It now moves to the head of the line for the final time: the next leg of the journey north is about to begin.

Farewell: As the Arriaga-Ixtepec finally pulls out of the station, sheet lightening begins to light up the sky. Austin and I stand near a pile of sleepers and wave goodbye as the train rolls by. The indocumentados wave back excitedly, shout out farewells in Spanish and English, and even in a couple of cases blow kisses. The mood on the train is one of nervous anticipation: the train is a direct route into an uncertain future. It would be silly to read the weather as an omen of any kind, but as the train disappears past the silos at the northern edge of town one can't help but wish that the night had been calmer. The next twelve hours are going to be difficult enough.

—

Part III in this series, “The Good Shepherd”, will be posted here on Friday.

Related posts:

1. Migration I: Waiting On the Arriaga-Ixtepec
2. Migration III: The Good Shepherd
3. Migration V: Arriaga Postscript

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Estuardo: Seventeen-year-old Estuardo arrives in Arriaga, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, from his home in Guatemala City on the same day that we do. He is seeking to ride a freight train north to Guadalajara and on to Los Angeles. It is his first time away from home.

Clifford: Estuardo sits on the tracks, which run through the centre of town, dividing it in two. He hopes to work as a baker when he reaches Los Angeles, where he will stay with a cousin. He is nervous about his passage north, however, and not without good reason. The route he is about to take is one of the most dangerous in the world: every year, thousands of Central American migrants are kidnapped, beaten or killed in Mexico, with criminal gangs posing the threat of robbery and public officials that of extortion, while others have been known to fall from the train and sustain heavy injuries. Amnesty International estimates that six in ten female migrants experiences sexual violence on the route.

Expect Success: A surprising number of migrants are making the trip for the second or third time, veterans of the passage as well as its primary mythologisers. José lived and worked in the United States before he was deported to Honduras earlier this year. He started north again almost immediately. A natural raconteur, he tells a number of horrific stories about the last time he rode the train, including one about a pregnant seventeen-year-old who fell from a boxcar and disappeared under the wheels.

Dario: Although technically another veteran of the passage, Dario has a very different story, mainly because the last time he made the trip was nine years ago. Back then, Arriaga was not the haven for migrants that it is now, but was rather crawling with immigration officials. It was also not the point of departure: back then, before Hurricane Stan destroyed the tracks in 2004, the train started in Tapachula, two hundred and seventy kilometres to the south. The biggest difference, however, is how dangerous the rest of the journey has become. In 2001, Dario took the train all the way from Tapachula to Ciudad Juárez without a problem, and swam across the Rio Grande to a new life. Today Los Zetas, a north-eastern drug cartel, has entered the illegal migrant industry and more or less controls the route. (Photo: Matthew Clayfield)

The Consulate: The centrality of Arriaga to the migrant experience is evidenced by the fact that both El Salvador and Guatemala have consulates in the town, an almost unheard of privilege for a place with only twenty-three thousand inhabitants. The consulates provide the migrants with food (noodles and cans of tuna are staples among those travelling north), coffee, bottled water and, despite the migrants' legal status, support. They also offer protection on those nights when the train is in town, which are also the nights that Los Zetas members have an unfortunate tendency to start showing up. A consulate-owned land cruiser and police cars patrol the streets all night. (A camera operator from TeleSUR, the regional television network, was asked by the El Salvadoran consul to warn us that we should be careful, too.)

The Next Tattoo: One of the Honduran indocumentados shows Estuardo where he is thinking of getting his next tattoo. Estuardo is travelling alone and has few real friends among the other migrants. Indeed, while a kind of makeshift community begins to develop over the course of a week on the tracks, one gets the sense that interpersonal relationships here are formed with the highest degree of caution. One indocumentado tells me he's at least as scared of his fellow travellers as he is of the possibility of gang violence later the journey.

Un Peso: Two indocumentados beg at the railway crossing, about twenty metres from the train station. Almost all the migrants are travelling north to the United States in pursuit of the American Dream: the destinations are as varied as Los Angeles, Houston, St Louis and New York City. While those who make it will most likely end up working long hours for low wages, it is worth remembering that, for them, no wage paid in US dollars is low. (One US dollar is worth nearly nineteen Honduran Lempiras.)

Un Otre: The begging begins at sunrise and goes on well into the night, with migrants taking to the crossing whenever hunger hits. Few are travelling with money: for one thing, they don't have any, and probably wouldn't need to leave home if they did, and for another there is the threat of robbery further north, which serves as a disincentive to carry even a couple of pesos.

K.O.: Estuardo plays an arcade game with Ramon, an Arriaga local, at a juice store near the town's zócalo. Estuardo is a very young, very innocent seventeen: he carries a knock-off Clifford backpack, disapproves of the older migrants' tendency to smoke marijuana on the roof of a building down near the tracks, and gets along better with people who are younger than him, like Ramon, than with people his own age.

Unlikely Friends: Estuardo and Ramon smash the buttons of the machine with their palms as they try to kick the shit out of each other. Despite Arriaga's aforementioned history as one of the riskier places for the indocumentados, today it is considered one of the safest and most welcoming. Ramon has no problems with Estuardo's nationality or legal status and is happy to lend him the one peso he needs to play the game.

Asleep at the Station: Although many of the indocumentados choose to sleep at the migrant shelter on the edge of town, others choose to sleep in town. Although less comfortable, roughing it at the station, under the zócalo's rotunda, or on the roof of an abandoned railway building, is not a bad idea: a number of the migrants currently in town missed the last train because they were out at the shelter. What's more, the shelter is prone to infiltration by members of Los Zetas, who pose as indocumentados in order to find out who's going where and, more importantly, who has relatives in the United States who could be forced to pay a ransom for a kidnapped family member. A rumour begins to spread on the night before the train's departure that one of the migrants at the shelter is not to be trusted for this reason.

Showering: Estuardo bathes in the fast-moving river that serves as Arriaga's southernmost border.

Laundry Day: Estuardo washes his shirt in the river, the railway bridge in the background serving as a constant reminder of the journey that lies ahead.

Down By the River: One of Estuardo's friends washes his clothes on a rock while a local boy looks on. The friend, a nineteen-year-old, will ultimately choose not to take the train when it arrives at the end of the week, nervous about rumours that immigration officials have set up checkpoints along the track further north. (In other iterations of the rumour, the army are the ones who have set up the checkpoints.) He decides to wait another week so that he can confirm the rumour's validity.

Charity: One of the most dedicated of the migrant beggars—he is out there on the road every day for hours at a time—receives a couple of pesos from a passer-by.

Raw Materials: Of the indocumentados sits atop a pile of rails, which will presumably be used at a later date to rebuild the stretch of track between Tapachula and Arriaga that was destroyed by Hurricane Stan in 2004. Huge piles of wooden sleepers can be found around the station, too. Hurricane Stan further complicated an already complicated situation. Some of the migrants, like Estuardo, opt to walk the nearly three hundred kilometre distance between the two towns and expose themselves to the risks that entails. Others, like José, have enough money to take one of the third-class bus lines, which stop anywhere along the route and not only at designated stations, getting off a kilometre or so before every checkpoint, taking a wide berth around it through the forest, and then emerging on the other side to wait for another bus.

Burning the Evidence: One of the indocumentados burns a list of a phone numbers on the advice of one of his travelling companions. The criminal gangs that have been known to board the train later in the trip are primarily interested in getting their hands on the phone numbers of migrants' relatives so they can demand ransom.

MasterChef Arriaga: While roadside begging occasionally yields pesos, some drivers prefer to donate food, with bananas being one of the most commonly gifted items. With a skillet borrowed from one of the nearby comedors, which sometimes donate their own leftover ingredients, a group of indocumentados cook breakfast.

Naked Flame: The indocumentados wait for breakfast to be served.

Bon Appetit: Estuardo waits to be served his share of fried banana.

The Roof: One of the more popular sleeping places for those who choose to spend their nights in town is the roof of one of the railway buildings, where, during the day, the migrants take advantage of the shade and relative seclusion in order to smoke pot. Marijuana is not a precious commodity here: a large number of the indocumentados have it with them or know where in town they can find it and share it among themselves without question.

Thinly-Veiled Disapproval: Estuardo watches as one of his fellow indocumentados smokes a joint on the roof of the railway building. "¿Te gusta la marihuana?" I asked him at one point, to which he shook his head vehemently.

The Waiting Game Continues: Over the course of several days, the migrants' mood of anticipation and excitement, run through as it is, in more than a few cases, with a liberal amount of fear, gives way to one of bored malaise. The days are long, the nights are longer, and there's very little to do to pass the time.

Alone at Dusk: The train finally arrives on Friday afternoon, six days after it was last in town. The easy part—the waiting—is almost over and the hard part—the journey—is about to begin. For many, the night before the train's departure is a dark one, with all the risks they are about to take in the forefront of their minds. Estuardo sits alone near the tracks, Arriaga's new clock tower, built to commemorate the Centenary of Revolution and the town's own hundredth anniversary, behind him, thinking about what lies before him. He has already admitted to us on several occasions that he is nervous about taking the train. But now he is actually scared. (Photo: Matthew Clayfield)

You Can't Stay Here: Estuardo moves to leave after being told by the stationmaster that he's not allowed to sleep on the front platform of the station. The train behind him is the Arriaga-Ixtepec freight service. A CNN article from June this year hyperbolically nicknamed the train "La Bestia," "The Beast," referring to the noise of its wheels as a screech and that of its horn as a snarl. Few call it that here on the tracks, however, where it simply known as el tren: the train. Not un tren, but el tren: not a, but the. For the indocumentados, there is only one way out of Chiapas, and this is it.

Congregation: News of the train's arrival spreads fast and soon the area around the station is full of indocumentados we've never seen before. Many of these were staying at the shelter and did not come into town unless absolutely necessary, while others have arrived today, lucking out where those who have been here a week already did not. While almost all of these indocumentados are heading to the United States, almost none of them claim they wish to stay there for more than two or three years at most. Andres, a Honduran teacher with impeccable English, is heading north to make enough money to open a language school back home. "I keep asking God to just give me one year," he says. "Just one year."

Caution: Estuardo flinches as a police car passes, worried that the train's arrival might lead to a crackdown by immigration officials. In reality, the police presence serves as protection for the migrants, who are sleeping in town en masse for the first time, the most vulnerable many have been all week.

Long Shadows, Longer Night: Estuardo stands on his own, working out where to spend the night.

The Sentry: Migrants sleep against the back wall of the Arriaga train station while one of their number keeps watch.

The Platform: Migrants sleep in the shadow of the train on the front platform of the station. Nearly one hundred migrants spent the night before the train's departure here on the grounds that it could leave at any given moment. The train does not run on a fixed schedule, but rather comes and goes at irregular intervals: not even the stationmaster knows what day it is likely to arrive or at what hour it is likely to leave.

Beneath the Beast: The liklihood of the train leaving while the indocumentados are elsewhere—the migrant shelter and the river being the most common places people have missed their passage—is high and the idea of spending between two and fifteen more days in Arriaga unappealing. From the moment it arrives, many never let it out of their sights.

The Rotunda: Many of the younger indocumentados, including Estuardo, choose to sleep under the zócalo's rotunda rather than nearer the tracks. The zócalo is well-lit where the station and the area around it is dark. Indeed, after a certain hour, Estuardo will not leave the square and urges us not to leave it either. "Los hombres malos," he insists, gesturing towards the railway building where, earlier in the day, he was happy to sit and wait for the train. "Los hombres malos. Bad men."

—

View Migration Part II: Boarding The Beast

Related posts:

1. Migration V: Arriaga Postscript
2. Migration II: Boarding the Beast
3. Migration III: The Good Shepherd

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Atten-Shun!: A group of young people take instructions near Felipe Carrillo Puerto's zócalo. The Mexican flag in the background flies at half-mast in memory of the students and protesters murdered in the Tlatelolco massacre of October 2, 1968.

Into Formation: Following drills in the shade of a tree, the band members move to form two lines in the sun following the arrival of their instructor.

Follow the Leader: Marching at the head of the corps, the young bandleader holds his bugle above his head and leads the line away to his left. He flourishes the instrument as much as he plays it, spinning it around at an impossible speed and thrusting it forward as if to point out the way.

Anyone Got Anything They'd Rather Be Doing Than Marching Up and Down the Square?: Locals watch as the corps runs through its routine. The Mayan temple of Balam Na, which was built by slaves and is today the town's Catholic Church, is visible in the background.

Compañeros in Arms: The line of drummers place their instruments on the ground in unison.

A Delayed Bugle: A bugler's hand rushes to straighten its instrument while the other musicians' stand at attention.

Related posts:

1. Mexican Bicentenary III: The Military Parade
2. Six Death Sun Shield
3. Mexcellaneous Vol. 1

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Fertile Rubble: Trees grow on one of Calakmul's nearly seven thousand structures. Located thirty-five kilometres from the Guatemalan border in the Mexican state of Campeche, the city is the largest and most important archaeological site in the Mayan world.

The Great Pyramid: Calakmul's Structure II is one of the tallest in the Mayan world and houses four tombs. This view was taken from the slightly smaller Structure I. A direct reference to these structures, "Calakmul" means "City of the Two Adjacent Pyramids" in the Mayan language.

A Well-Manicured Ruin: Palenque's Temple of the Inscriptions contains the tomb of K'inich Janaab' Pakal, who ruled the city state for nearly seventy years. Located in the state of Chiapas, Palenque is one of southern Mexico's most popular tourist destinations.

The View from the Steps: Calakmul's Structure II, which is forty-five metres tall.

Stairway to Heaven: Calakmul's Structure II. The archaeological site, which mostly covers some twenty square kilometres and consists primarily of residential structures, was discovered by air in 1931.

This Machine Kills Jaguars: On top of Calakmul's Structure I, Matthew prepares to murder a big cat in the interest of self-defence.

Not Quite Jaguars: Two of Calakmul's resident spider monkeys. In addition to being home to five of Mexico's six species of big cat—including jaguars—Calakmul is also the natural habitat for three hundred and fifty species of bird, ninety-four species of mammal, and sixteen hundred species of plant.

A Sea of Green: Looking out towards Guatemala from Calakmul's Structure II as one of the site's minor structures pokes its head through the jungle canopy.

A City in the Mist: Palenque from its highest point, the Temple of the Cross, which is the largest temple in the Cross Group of structures that also includes the the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Foliated Cross.

Rebuilding a Ruin: Scaffolding flanks Palenque's Palace complex, which contains a number of well-preserved sculptures and bas reliefs. The complex's four-storey observation tower is visible in the background.

Structural Work: Construction work on Palenque's Palace complex. The Temple of the Inscriptions is visible in the background.

Siesta in the Ruins: Workers take an afternoon nap at Yagul, an archaeological site in the state of Oaxaca associated with the Zapotec civilization. Occupied during the Spanish Conquest and its residents relocated, Yagul was excavated in the 1950s and 1960s.

If These Walls Could Talk: One of the Cross Group temples looks down on the ruined walls of Palenque's Palace.

Temple Views: A tourist—one of the thousands who visit Palenque each year—alights the Temple of the Cross. Arriving at the site first thing in the morning affords a visitor two pleasures: the chance to experience the ruins while they are still shrouded in mist and the run of the place before the tour buses and hawkers begin arriving.

An Eroded Maze: A worker's wheelbarrow overlooks the ruined walls of Yagul's Palace of the Six Patios.

Related posts:

1. Rehearsing Revolution
2. Mexican Bicentenary III: The Military Parade
3. Mexcellaneous Vol. 1

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Two Flags: A VW Beetle, one of the most popular and ubiquitous cars in Mexico, sports a patriotic license plate in a Oaxaca carport.

God's Country: The view from a rocky outcrop near the Mayan ruins of Yagul near Oaxaca.

The View at 10,000 Feet: The pueblo of Cuajimoloyas in the Sierra Juárez Mountains, near Oaxaca. The town sits at an elevation of 3,100 metres.

Progress and Reform: A little girl walks down a precipitously steep road in Cuajimoloyas.

Race You to the Top: Two schoolgirls celebrate the end of the day in Cuajimoloyas.

If I Only Had a Brain: A rudimentary scarecrow guards the corn in Cuajimoloyas.

Come Behind: A farmer and his dog herd a small flock of sheep up a mountain road on the outskirts of Cuajimoloyas.

El Viejo y el Mar: An amateur fisherman in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, watches the water moments before casting his net.

Self-Portrait: A couple record their public display of affection in front of a giant video screen during preparations for Mexico City's Bicentenary of Independence celebrations.

Founding Fascists: Portraits of Mexico's founding fathers defaced by vandals—most likely indigenous rights activists—in Oaxaca.

Before Sunrise: An almost-empty street leading to Mexico City's Zócalo on the morning of the city's famous marathon.

8½: Fireworks over Mexico City's Zócalo during the Bicentenary of Independence celebrations.

Motion Blur: Hundreds of professional and amateur runners cross the starting line at the beginning of the women's marathon. Some will not make it back to this point for another four or five hours.

Supply and Demand: A marathon volunteer scrambles to grab as many water cups as she can in order to service to steady stream of runners at the marathon's midpoint.

Is It In You?: A volunteer's hand offers water to passing marathon participants.

A Roaring Trade: Paper cups litter the pavement at the marathon's midpoint.

16158: A marathon participant crosses the finishing line.

Three Bands of Orange: The Mexico City Metro.

Now You See Me: Cheap sunglasses for sale at Parque Chapultepec in Mexico City.

Mexican Bluebeards: Video piracy alive and well—and completely unhidden—on the streets of Oaxaca.

Child of the Talking Cross: On the steps of the Sanctuary of the Talking Cross in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo. Formerly known as Chan Santa Cruz, the capital of the Maya Free State until its annexation by Mexico at the beginning of last century, the town was famous for being the place where, according to legend, a speaking crucifix emerged from a spring and instructed the Mayan leaders to resist those of European descent.

On the Eve of Independence: Bicentenary decorations on Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma.

Helium and Neon: Oaxaca's Zócalo.

Never Let Me Go: Lovers on Oaxaca's Zócalo rotunda.

An Impromptu Dance: Band members laugh as onlookers spontaneously join in on Oaxaca's Zócalo.

So Did We Move Along and Toward the Light: Punters slowly make their way out of Mexico City's Plaza de Toros after the last bullfight of the season.

Related posts:

1. Mexcellaneous Vol. 2
2. A Sunday Service
3. Six Death Sun Shield

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Turkey Shot: The last two birds at the Villa de Zaachila mercado huddle together in the aftermath of a downpour.

Left for Dead: A Villa de Zaachila chicken that was not so lucky when the poultry vendors fled the rain.

Everybody Put Your Hands in the Air: A group of Villa de Etla chickens that were arguably even less lucky.

Pescado: A Villa de Etla fishmonger.

Blessed are the Butchers: The Virgin of Guadalupe watches over the Villa de Etla meat vendors.

Some Animals are More Equal Than Others: Perfect for soup, a pig's head hangs above a Villa de Etla meat stall, eyes closed, eerily human.

Chicken Under Tungsten: A poultry stall at Mercado 20 de Noviembre, a compact, dimly-lit marketplace in the heart of Oaxaca.

Butchery and Barbecue: One of the great charms of Mercado 20 de Noviembre is its smoky alleyway of on-site cooking stalls, where you can select a cut of meat for lunch and have it grilled before you on the spot.

Sweet and Sticky: A honey stall at Central de Abastos, Oaxaca's biggest (and reportedly most dangerous) inner-city mercado.

Remember to Tip the Band: Mariachi bands and individual musicians wander the mercados playing music for those eating at the comedors (regardless of whether or not those eating actually want them to) and then ask for tips, which are not always forthcoming.

Bistek: Mariachis serenade the meat vendors in Villa de Etla.

Es la vida de un perro: Dogs aren't very popular in Mexico and every village has a good many strays wandering around looking for something to eat.

Well, Obviously it's Not Meant to Be Taken Literally. It Refers to Any Manufacturers of Dairy Products: A cheese stall in Villa de Etla, specialising in the stringy Oaxacan cheese that is used in cooking throughout Mexico.

Related posts:

1. The Spectacle of Tragedy
2. A Sunday Service
3. Mexican Bicentenary III: The Military Parade

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Related posts:

1. Drug Wars I: A Tapestry of Murder
2. Night on Bald Mountain
3. Don’t Fear the Reaper

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

—

Basilicas Old and New:

Floral Offerings:

At the Shrine:

Plastic Saviour:

Rapture:

Capitalist Catholicism:

A Veil of Crucifixes:

The Virgin Mary To Go:

Related posts:

1. Mezcal, Mole and Mercados
2. Mexican Bicentenary III: The Military Parade
3. The Spectacle of Tragedy

On Sunday, when he was buried, the newspaper he worked for, El Diario de Juárez, ran the usual image of the country’s flag alongside its masthead. Today, however, the flag was dripping with blood.

“¿Qué quieren de nosotros?” the headline asked. “What do they want from us?” No suspects had been named in the case and no one had taken responsibility for the shooting. A Chihuahua state attorney’s office spokesman later said the murder was not related to Santiago’s journalistic work, but rather to “a personal problem,” a line heard on more than occasion before in relation to such cases.

But there was no question who it was that the paper’s use of “they” in its headline referred to.

What followed was a passionate and highly unorthodox open letter from the paper’s editorial staff to Ciudad Juárez’s rival drug cartels, which are currently jostling, with bloody results, for control of the infamous border city’s coveted trafficking routes into the United States. (Juárez, Mexico’s most dangerous city, borders El Paso, one of the United States’ safest.)

“We don’t want to see more dead,” the open letter read. “We don’t want to see more wounded nor do we want to be intimidated. It is impossible for us to do our job under these conditions.”

It has been impossible for quite some time. That the most remarkable thing about the murder of Santiago was not the brazen manner in which it took place, but rather the paper’s subsequent editorial, is telling. In Juárez, where between eight and twelve homicides are recorded every day—this is, for many people’s money, the homicide capital of the world—and where bicentenary celebrations were cancelled in case the cartels tried anything funny, there is nothing less remarkable than a brazenly committed murder. Or, for that matter, a dead journalist.

Indeed, not only was Santiago not the first journalist to be killed in Juárez, he wasn’t even the first from El Diario. In 2008, the paper’s crime reporter, Armando Rodríguez, was gunned down in his driveway while preparing to take his daughter to school. Two prosecutors investigating that case were later killed within a month of each other. None of these murders have ever been solved.

The carnage is not limited to Juárez, either. In July this year, Hugo Alfredo Olivera Cartas, the editor of El Diem, a small paper in the western state of Michoacán, was found sitting in his pickup truck one fine summer morning with three bullets in his head. The death of Santiago brings the number of Mexican journalists killed this year to nine. Chillingly, with over three months left of the year, last year’s bumper crop of eight bodies has already been surpassed.

The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists this month released a report dealing with the impact of the drug wars on the country’s journalists and press freedoms. The conclusions reached were as negative as the journalistic death toll was high.

“Twenty-two journalists have been murdered since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa took office in December 2006, at least eight in direct reprisal for reporting on crime and corruption,” the report, Silence or Death in Mexico‘s Press, read. “Three media support workers have been slain and at least seven other journalists have gone missing during this period. In addition, dozens of journalists have been attacked, kidnapped or forced into exile.”

The report also detailed the more subtle—which is to say, less bloody—effects of the drug wars on the country’s press. Primary and most insidious among these is the culture of self-censorship that has arisen, with numerous newspapers, as well as radio and television stations, flatly refusing to cover drug-related violence, either as a result of cartel bribes or else without any prompting at all. In February, The Dallas Morning News reported that more than two-hundred people had been killed in the border city of Reynosa as Los Zetas, a north-eastern cartel, did battle with their former bosses, the Gulf Cartel, for control of the state of Tamaulipas. Not a word of this was so much as mentioned in the local press, which Los Zetas more or less controls. Forget bribes. The allure of not being beheaded on videotape can often be currency enough in such matters.

The CPJ report also notes the failure of the Calderón Government’s militaristic approach to the cartels—there are currently some 4500 police and federal troops in Ciudad Juárez alone—and indeed the most controversial passage in the El Diario editorial was one in which its authors, deferring to the cartel bosses as “señores,” acknowledged that the rules are no longer being set by the government but by the drug lords.

“You are the de facto authority in the city now,” the editorial read. “We ask you to explain what you want from us, what we should try to publish or not publish, so we know what to expect.”

President Calderon’s spokesman for security matters, Alejandro Poire, immediately denounced the editorial as a dangerous form of appeasement. “It simply is not appropriate in any way, shape or form, for any party to try to make agreements with, promote a truce with, or negotiate with criminals,” he said. Following a meeting with the CJP and the Inter American Press Association, Calderon this week announced that he would push for legislation that would make attacks on journalists a federal crime while simultaneously providing protection and support for those deemed to be at risk. He has attempted to push for such legislation before, however, only to see it stall in congress.

The CPJ’s executive director, Joel Simon, agreed that the letter seemed overly deferential to the cartel bosses, though he acknowledged that the sentiments in the letter were “understandable.” “I think the big losers are, obviously, the public,” he said in an interview with public radio.

El Diario‘s editors, however, insist that their editorial did not amount to a surrender, and it is true that they have continued to run stories about the drug wars in the wake of last week’s murder.

But the fact that they should have run such a letter at all remains a sign of the extent to which conditions in the north of the country have deteriorated. While news organisations throughout the north have gone mum one by one on the question of the cartels, El Diario and other Juárez papers, despite the obvious, ever-present risks, have thus far remained fiercely committed to the ideal of speaking truth to power.

Let us hope that its commitment to that ideal didn’t die with Luis Carlos Santiago Orozco.

An edited version of this article appeared under the title ‘Reporters suffer in Mexican mayhem’ in The Australian on Monday, September 27, 2010. That version is accessible here.

Related posts:

1. Revolución en el Norte
2. Mexican Bicentenary III: The Military Parade
3. Drug Wars I: A Tapestry of Murder

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Diamond squadron.

Marching cries.

Drumsticks.

Marching heels.

The face in the line.

Sand tank / asphalt lane.

Battle striped.

Ropeplay.

Barrels through the sombreros.

Symbols of construction and destruction.

Related posts:

1. Mexican Bicentenary I: Joint Session of Congress
2. Mexican Bicentenary II: Fireworks Fiesta
3. Rehearsing Revolution

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

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Opposing guards.

Two ears, three hats. Across central Mexico City 40,000 forces were deployed for the largest celebrations in the nation's history.

Mobility where in a few hours there will be none.

Hair stripe / wind stripe.

Fingers I (they reach out in support)

Fingers II

Fingers III (they reach out for poncho-wrapped light wands)

The light wands make their entrance.

Beams across the sky.

Man and his creation.

Giant in the fog.

Eye oh oh. Photo credit Matthew Clayfield.

Mexico, population 24.

The National Palace prepares.

¡Viva!

President Felipe Calderón delivers his annual 'El Grito de la Independencia' (Cry of Independence) from the balcony of the National Palace.

Cathedral projections as hundreds of camera and phone LCDs watch.

Fireworks after bedtime.

Lights in the sky / lights on the ground. An estimated eight tons of fireworks were set off.

Still dressed in their uniforms, participants from the evening's parade sleep on the late-service metro.

Related posts:

1. Mexican Bicentenary III: The Military Parade
2. Mexican Bicentenary I: Joint Session of Congress
3. The Spectacle of Tragedy

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Words by Matthew Clayfield / Photos by Austin Andrews

—

Related posts:

1. Mexican Bicentenary III: The Military Parade
2. Mexican Bicentenary II: Fireworks Fiesta
3. In Broad Daylight

This first entry looks at the last bullfight of the season at the Plaza de toros México in Mexico City.

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Enter the bull. Constructed in 1947 with a capacity of 48,000, the Plaza de toros México is the largest bullring in the world.

Charge/dodge. Banned in most of the world, blood sports are on the decline through Latin America and bullfighting is no exception.

The matador's dance of deception.

Size up, stare down.

Moving targets and false doors.

Ice pop intermission.

Decoy.

Left to right, legs down, legs up.

The bull prepares to charge.

Harpoons/horns.

Speed and the space between.

Prepare the matador.

Rival stories of determination and blood loss.

Stare.

Fabric carrot.

Red handed swordplay.

Kill shot.

Victorious, the matador clutches his trophies: the severed ears of his opponent.

Clean-up part I: pit level.

Clean-up part II: street level.

–

Later, in the bullfighting press, the sixth and final bull, Amigo, was made out to be very good, very noble, with only one or two writers bothering to recall that he had started out poorly and that the crowd had called for his replacement. They also failed to note that Lorenzo, trying hard to entertain the audience after a pedestrian and uninspired beginning, worked the bull one series too many and had to kill him after three lacklustre final passes. Again the crowd was crying out, this time urging the twenty-year-old matador to kill the bull already, to come on, get it over with, he’s no good anymore, this is ridiculous. Lorenzo received two ears for his efforts, but only after one very vocal section of the crowd, his family and friends, protested the judge’s initial decision to award him only one. One, of course, was all he actually deserved. And by seven o’clock the season was over.

Related posts:

1. Mexican Bicentenary II: Fireworks Fiesta
2. A Sunday Service
3. Mexican Bicentenary III: The Military Parade

The geometry of patriotism. Near Union Station, Kansas City.

Preferential boarding. King Street Station, Seattle.

Early morning station call. Whitefish, Montana.

Angles to rail level. Union Station, Kansas City.

The baggage cart on platform 5.

Sunrise sightseers aboard the Empire Builder. Northern Idaho.

Carriage corridors.

Sunrise photographer.

A smoke break at Dallas Union Station as rains from Hurricane Hermine lash the platform.

Comings and goings at Seattle's King Street Station.

Related posts:

1. The Butte, MT Power Grid
2. Fluorescents Bleed Underground
3. Transit Nation: A Trip on the Millennium Line