I have often been tagged with being too generous on the deals I would offer Mexico. Please read the two articles below.
1. Neither party is willing to stand against the current demographics. If the ASB’s put a lake of fire on the southern border of the US the political demographics would keep the USG from barring further Mexican immigration. There are too many citizen Mexicans for that one to fly. That chance was lost over the last twenty years of partisan posturing. No one wanted to take the flak on civil liberties, on a national ID card, on seeming ‘insensitive. Too many business interests enjoyed what cheap labor brought them. Actions have consequences.
2. No one is going to sit and watch his kids starve while there is work and food north of the border. The distances are too short and the risks too few relative to the rewards. We either bring up Mexico or they all move here. Our border controls are a form of tax. A few dozen at a time die. A few hundred at a time are robbed, raped or seriously hurt. A quarter to a third get caught, lose their fee to the coyote and get sent home. This discourages many. However like a leaky dike all it can do is slow down the flood, not stop it.
3. Our politics presume infinite dither time. We have gotten it so far. However, Mexico is a volcano. It blew at the turn of the last century. Most of the current citizen Mexican population of the US dates from refugees from that ten year bloodbath, not from old Spanish days. If there is a Mexican meltdown – a seriously disputed Presidential election, a serious coup attempt by the PRI old guard and / or the drug lords – you will have a stampede to the US border. You could get 60-80 million additional people in a period of a week to ten days plus a war with the rump government [the USG will not sit by while a Mexican government practices pacification by artillery fire in TJ or Juarez]. Once this genie is out of the bottle there is no putting it back
So while the USG dicks around in Afghanistan, Iraq and road maps to Gaza, just remember that they are ignoring the volcano hoping it doesn’t blow [or, more realistically that it blows on someone else’s watch]. There are no pretty solutions to this BUT once it goes all possibilities get MUCH uglier.
Scott
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 9, 2003; Page A19
Latinos have become the "it" community in U.S. politics, and both Republicans and Democrats are trying to win them over. The latest example of this trend: 20 Republican lawmakers and 50 of their aides have taken up Spanish.
Rep. Gerald C. Weller (R-Ill.) has organized the class, taught by the Department of Agriculture's graduate school. The two-hour sessions will run 10 legislative weeks, and Republicans are hoping it will help them bond with Latino voters.
This is not the first time congressional Republicans have embraced español: Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.) organized a class earlier this year, and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) did one as well. But this is "by far the most ambitious effort," according to Weller spokesman Ben Fallon.
In a statement, Weller said he was confident the GOP's scholastic efforts would pay political dividends. "Republicans in Congress are eager to work with the Hispanic community on President Bush's agenda, and the launch of Spanish on the Hill shows we are serious about working with Spanish-speaking America," he said.
Democrats, of course, are less than impressed.
"Actions count more than delivering a message in Spanish," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Robert Menendez (N.J.). "Instead of learning Spanish, Republicans must understand the priorities of Hispanic families -- and those priorities do not include tax breaks for the wealthy at the expense of 1.6 million Hispanic families who will not receive a child tax credit this year."
TEHUIPANGO, Mexico -- As the temperature dipped below freezing in these long forgotten mountains, Justo Chipahua Panzo, 11, sat in his unheated classroom and worried about tomorrow. The fifth-grader had just eaten a school breakfast of watery soup and beans, which he bought with a spare peso -- the equivalent of about a dime. But he said that kind of luck never happens two days in a row.
"We probably won't have any money tomorrow, and at home we never have enough food," said Justo, whose diminutive size and blemished skin are telltale signs of chronic malnutrition. Despite significant social advances in Mexico and an overall improvement in nutrition, two million children under the age of 5 are chronically malnourished, a number that has not changed in 30 years, according to the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition. The problem is concentrated in almost 700 poor rural towns, where a new generation of Mexicans is growing up without adequate food or clean water.
In places such as Tehuipango, in Veracruz state, breakfast, lunch and dinner sometimes consist of little more than tortillas and salt. Although there are new government relief efforts, children often live with chronic diarrhea or other stomach ailments, which undermine attempts to improve nutrition. Millions suffer developmental problems, such as impaired vision, nagging skin disease and poor memory. Many 7-year-olds here are the size of average 3-year-olds in wealthier parts of the country.
"In the poorest regions the problem has not improved," said Abelardo Avila, a physician who is the national institute's research director. "It's an illusion to say it is getting better in these places."
"I will tell you what malnutrition is -- you go into a town and you cannot find a smile on a child's face," said Jose Ignacio Avalos, the founder of Un Kilo de Ayuda (A Kilo of Help), a nonprofit group distributing subsidized food throughout Mexico.
Avalos recalled meeting a 6-year-old named Pablo, who was eating ants crawling over a rotten pumpkin. "I asked him why he didn't eat the pumpkin," Avalos said. "And he said if he did, the ants would go away and he would have nothing."
Indigenous Are Hardest Hit
For decades, the government found it easy to ignore Tehuipango. About 18,000 people live here, on the not-so-gentle slopes of the spectacular Zongolico mountains, in view of the snowy Pico de Orizaba, North America's third-highest mountain.
Until recently, it was a four-hour drive over ragged ribbons of mountain road to get to bigger towns, places with street lamps, cars and different kinds of food. Candelaria Panzo Panzo, Justo's 37-year-old mother, said her relatives rarely had bus fare to visit the nearest city, Orizaba. They would sometimes walk, even though it took more than a day.
Like many people here, Panzo is a Nahua Indian and lives in a home with no electricity, television or phone. She has little contact with the outside world. Panzo heard of a war this year in a place called Iraq -- a friend of a friend saw pictures of it on his boss's television.
Life here has continued in quiet isolation, much as it has for centuries, since the Spanish drove indigenous peoples off the flat, fertile lands and into the deserts or these craggy mountains. The name of this town means "stone upon stone," and that's what residents find when they hack the hard earth trying to find places to grow corn on mountainsides 7,700 feet above sea level.
Tehuipango has been identified by the government as one of the 10 poorest places in the country for as long as anyone can remember, but little ever has been done about it. While Mexico is the world's ninth-largest economy, wealth has never trickled down to such places as Tehuipango, where the daily routine for many is a struggle for food.
Politics, geography, education and centuries-old customs have contributed to keeping vast numbers of Mexicans malnourished and destitute.
Under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, the government frequently focused its resources not on the neediest but on those who could guarantee votes, according to political analysts. Avila said the PRI, as the party is known, also suppressed information on malnourished children because it wasn't good for the country's image.
"It was absurd repression. It was considered an attack on the government to say that there were so many malnourished kids. It was politically incorrect to talk about it," said Avila, who has worked at the government institute for 17 years. "We have long known exactly where the problems were but we have lost many opportunities to solve it."
Officials, doctors and families here said that while many past presidents characterized poverty as Mexico's greatest problem, they ignored places where it was most severe.
"Once in a great while, during an election, politicians would come and hand out rice or a bag of food. Then years would pass and there would be no more handouts," said Panzo, whose home consists of a dirt floor enclosed by scraps of aluminum and cardboard for the walls and roof.
"My parents did not know there was such a thing as a president and national government," she said, echoing stories told by many families here. "We didn't know there was anybody offering help out there."
Some officials were keeping the help for themselves. The town's previous mayor, who belonged to the PRI, was jailed after he left office for misusing $4 million in government funds. The current mayor, a member of President Vicente Fox's National Action Party, is the town's first non-PRI mayor in decades.
Xochitl Galvez, the government's first cabinet official in charge of indigenous affairs, said communities like Tehuipango have also been ignored and abused because Indians live here.
"The indigenous have suffered from the enormous amount of discrimination and racism that exists in Mexico," Galvez said, noting that 90 percent of the country's 12 million indigenous people live in poverty. Most of the nearly 700 municipalities identified by the federal government as "high risk" areas for malnutrition are largely indigenous.
Panzo and her six children speak Nahuatl and only a few words of Spanish. Neither she nor her husband, Jose Chipahua, attended school. Until the 1990s, girls here did not attend school and almost no mothers here can read or write.
An engineer by training, Galvez said she believes in practical steps to address the poverty here: "Fix the infrastructure: electricity, water, highways. That will bring people into the mainstream. For one thing, a good road into these places will make getting vegetables there cheaper."
Just this spring, the government opened a new paved road to Orizaba, cutting the drive time in half, to two hours.
"This will help us move forward," said mayor Francisco Chipahua Temoxtle. "We can sell our goods more easily now, children can go to the high school in Orizaba, it's easier to get a sick person to the hospital."
The mayor is now putting the finishing touches on a new concrete civic plaza in the town square that had been only mud and dust.
Avalos, whose nonprofit group distributes subsidized food to the poor, said long-term solutions such as creating jobs and improving education are more valuable than government food handouts: "Paternalistic programs do not help self-sufficiency."
Avalos said malnutrition in Mexico differs from the famines of Africa. In some cases people do not have access to enough food, but in more cases the bigger problem is that mothers never have been taught what a proper diet is, or how to prepare hygienic meals. People drink tainted water without boiling it, children develop parasites that rob them of nutrients and enter a cycle of sickness and hunger that cripples their development.
"It's a health problem, an education problem and a food problem," Avalos said.
Schoolchildren Are Fed First
Panzo said the biggest change in her life came in December, when a man came to her one-room home, saying he was conducting a survey for the federal government.
He wanted to know how many children she had and how much her husband earned. She explained that he often has no work, but that sometimes he cuts sugar cane or plants corn for $3 a day. With that, Panzo was soon enrolled in Oportunidades (Opportunities), the federal government's main anti-poverty program. The program has expanded since Fox took office in 2000 and now assists 1.8 million additional families.
The government reports it has doubled spending on its Oportunidades program to nearly $2 billion dollars a year and reaches 4.2 million families -- 21 million people, more than one-fifth of the country's population. Officials said they have created a computerized system to verify how the money is spent, records they said were lacking in the past.
Panzo now receives a $30 cash subsidy each month. To qualify, she is required to keep her children in school and have their height and weight measured regularly by Nahum Tenorio, the town doctor.
"It is easy to see they are all malnourished," Tenorio said, wearing a black woolen cap and scarf in his unheated clinic, as he attended a long line of patients.
He said Panzo's 2-year-old son, Lazaro, has a distended belly, and the black streaks on Panzo's pretty brown skin are a sign of severe vitamin deficiency. "She is malnourished herself and she is breast-feeding her baby," Tenorio said.
The doctor sent Panzo to a soup kitchen, where a nurse offered her children bananas and apples, chicken and warm bean soup. They can go there several times a week, while the nurse teaches Panzo and other mothers with malnourished children how to prepare healthier food.
Panzo said her family's diet consists mostly of tortillas, often filled with pigweed, a coarse green plant that grows nearby. They had never before eaten citrus fruit or red meat.
As the mother stood in the doorway of her flimsy shack, with a turkey fluttering in a corner inside, she said it was impossible to do everything that doctors and humanitarian workers tell her to do.
For starters, she doesn't like the taste of the vitamin-enriched powdered milk the government hands out, so she hasn't consumed a drop of milk in more than a year. "I mix it with water and give it to the kids, or to the animals," she said, with her 9-month-old boy wrapped in a wool blanket at her breast.
Water is an even bigger problem, she said. "They tell me to boil water because it will be cleaner and we won't get sick so much," she said. "Well how can I do that? It takes three or four hours of walking to get the wood for a fire."
The forests around Tehuipango have long been depleted by people looking for wood to burn or sell, forcing her to walk farther and farther from her home with a baby on her back.
Even with the new government subsidy, which she uses to buy sugar, soap and other essentials, Panzo says she has to prioritize the feeding of her children. "First I feed the children who go to school because the teachers say if I don't, they fall asleep."
Justo and Julio, 10, who is constantly squinting and has poor vision, and Mario, 8, a skinny little boy missing his front teeth, are fed first.
Justo divides his time between home and a government shelter next to the school, where he moved after one of his teachers visited his home and recommended that he move out. "At least there he gets food three times a day," said the teacher, Luis Gonzalez Mequixtle, who was worried about Justo's lack of energy and inability to focus. None of the other children was willing to leave home.
After the three older boys eat, Panzo feeds Valentina, 5, her noticeably tiny daughter, and Lazaro, 2. After that, she feeds her husband. She eats last, and the baby survives on what comes from her breast.
"We have food when we have money," she said. "When we don't, we don't eat."
Chipahua, the mayor, said "sudden change" has come to Tehuipango but that "malnutrition that has been here for a century is not going to disappear in a year."
Neither are the blemishes on Justo's face. Standing beside his mother, he said he hoped one day to live in a better house, where his family wouldn't get soaked every time it rains. He said he would like to stay in school.
He didn't want to spend a lifetime -- as did his father and grandfather -- toiling in the rocky fields struggling to grow enough food to stay alive, he said.
"I want to be a politician -- maybe even the president -- so I can help people," he said.
Researcher Mireya Olivas in Mexico City contributed to this report.
posted by scott 9:38 AM