21 Dec 10 | Americas, Mexico
The fight between the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico and liberal sectors of society continues.
A book “The Church against Mexico,” penned by 21 leading academics and writers hit the bookstores in early December after it was presented at the International Book Fair in Guadalajara.
According to the book, the church continues to attempt to destroy the secularism of Mexico. Most of the book authors live and work in Mexico City, where the leftist government of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has promoted gay marriage and the adoption of children by gay couples, angering the conservative sectors of the Mexican Catholic church.
The book was the latest salvo from those liberal sectors. The book includes political cartoons showing how the power of the Catholic Church has dominated in Mexico for the last five centuries. Some of the book collaborations include cartoons showing the alleged links between the church and drug traffickers. Recently it was found that top leaders of the drug cartel Los Zetas had financed the building of one church in Pachuca, Hidalgo, a city located an hour from Mexico City.
The problema is that Mexico is still a very religious country, and the fight between liberal and conservative sectors over such policies as gay rights and abortion will only continue to get hotter. After the publication of “The Church Against Mexico”, the church replied through the Bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Felipe Arizmendi, who said the church not only needed freedom of religion but also freedom of expression, so the church could defend its policies and beliefs.
Bishop Arizmendi also said if the church was against Mexico, “would the poor and the suffering turn to the church for comfort?” Bishop Arizmendi made headlines earlier this year, when he said that pedophile priests were “execrable” or scandalous, but that those violations occurred a long time ago and are not occurring in today´s church. The remarks were made after a group that promotes prosecution of pedophile priests announced that there were 65 Roman Catholic priests accused of child abuse living in Mexico. and that several of them were working for the Catholic churches in the country.
20 Dec 10 | Uncategorized
During the last few weeks, Wikileaks has been in focus in all kinds of media worldwide. This has certainly been the case in Sweden, and for a number of very different reasons.
But if Wikileaks represents a new sort of journalism, as some commentators have been arguing, then the media response has followed its own and rather dated logic. The first two rounds of leaked US documents stirred up a debate concerning their content — including new information about US military activities in Iraq. The latest round, Cablegate, which exposes diplomatic cables has led to a heated discussion about Wikileaks itself. As McLuhan (almost) put it, the medium risks becoming the message.
Not that the Cablegate documents aren’t interesting in themselves. The Swedes discovered that their government, after first letting the CIA land planes making secret prisoner transports changed their minds about the system and discontinued cooeperation in 2006. This was very welcome news. But the released diplomatic correspondence started a discussion about the nature of secrecy itself — what is legitimate discretion and what is just much smoke and mirrors, intended to keep citizens in the dark?
Interesting as that may be from a philosophical point of view, the real discussion point this time is Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange — after the allegations of sexual harassment and rape emerged during his stay in Sweden. Ironically, the matter has been thoroughly exposed on Swedish blogs and websites. Everyone who wants to know the details of the allegations can find names, places and other “facts” online — very much in the spirit of Wikileaks itself. What you learn as you step into this mire of allegations, counter-allegations, facts and speculations is how sordid and complicated the matter is. The general opinion in Sweden — if indeed such an opinion really can be discerned — is that Assange should face a Swedish court and, probably, be released for lack of evidence. Not many commentators here really believe that he runs the risk of being delivered into the hands of the US authorities.
If we restrict our discussion to Wikileaks as a phenomenon in its own right, the general opinion in the Swedish press (with few divergent voices) is that something of this kind is necessary and even welcome — if handled with the proper journalistic ethos. As columnist Lars Linder argues in the largest Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter (12/12). “Wikileaks operate within the territory of classic journalism.” As Linder put it: “Wikileaks has shown us that what the powers that be really hide behind their speeches on “security” and “responsibility” — and that is ‘too much’.”
Wikileaks operates within the spirit of the classic muck-raking journalism that we tend to respect and consider more or less heroic — 10 to 20 years after the fact. During the Watergate crisis the Washington Post was accused of having a hidden (left-wing Democratic) political agenda and meddling in things they did not fully grasp. Today we consider their exposure of Nixon as a triumph of democracy. Wikileaks’ abilility to rally support is, of course, rooted in another fact: that many of the democratic states during the so-called “War on Terror” have been rolling back fundamental human rights. In that context the Wikileaks’ phenomenon can be regarded as a necessary push in the other direction.
Therefore it is even more outrageous that media channels in the above-mentioned democratic countries like the US and Canada have been filled with comments that must be seen as death threats. There is no other way to interpret quotes from for example Fox news contributor Bob Beckel who, speaking about Assange, encourages his viewers to “illegally shoot the son of a bitch”. There have been numerous such quotes during the recent weeks.
And this brings us to the bottom line: if democratic states shut down inopportunistic news channels with questionable or even illegal means — and if death threats to journalists are accepted as part of common political discourse — what is there to say the next time a journalist is shot in Mexico or put behind bars in China or Iran? Nothing. As Pen International states: “In a world where journalists are regularly physically attacked, imprisoned and killed with impunity, calling for the death of a journalist is irresponsible and deplorable.”
And that, my friends, is a wake-up call.
Ola Larsmo is a Swedish novelist and freelance critic, and president of Swedish PEN
10 Dec 10 | Americas, Mexico
As in every country affected by Wikileaks, Mexico is trying to figure out what to learn from the released cables that undress what U.S. officials think of this country and its politicians.
In the released documents US Ambassador Carlos Pascual, and other US officials, openly discuss their doubts about the effectiveness of Mexican security institutions.
But what has sent people into a spin are revelations that US agencies were the ones that had the intelligence that led Mexican Navy units to ambush and kill a powerful drug trafficker in December last year. One cable also reveals that it was US forces that hand-picked the Mexican Navy to carry out this and other attacks against wanted drug traffickers.
But for those who do not get offended by the fact that their next door neighbour is prying into internal affairs, the cables have contributed to provide the common citizen with more information on how their government is carrying on with the drug war.
The progressive newspaper La Jornada published a very thoughtful editorial last Sunday which argued that the cables confirm many truths often denied by the government of Felipe Calderon in its battle against drug traffickers. One cable revealed that there was serious in-fighting between the two government organs that oversee justice and police work. The head of the Public Security Ministry, Genaro Garcia Luna and former attorney general Eduardo Medina Mora, went at each other´s throat for most of the first half of Calderon’s presidential term between 2007 and 2009. The revelations in the cable feed into Mexico’s penchant for conspiracy theories. For the last three years rumours printed in columns by prestigious journalists talked about the fight between the two top government officials over operations, intelligence and the President’s ear, but the rumours were never clarified by the government and were always denied.
Today with the Wikileaks revelations, the public that has taken the time to read the stories on the revelations is better informed, but the government has lost face as it enters its last two years in office and confronts its worst public image. According to a recent poll by Consulta Mitofsky, three of every four Mexicans queried believes they live in a worse situation now than a year ago. The president closes his fourth year in office with a dismal approval rate of 54 percent.
Wikileaks here helped keep the electorate informed with old news, but the impact is still the same–more transparency.
The same is occurring in Bogota, Colombia, in an internal scandal in which the security apparatus of the former President Alvaro Uribe allegedly organised phone tapping of leading politicians, jurists and journalists.
The information was first revealed in documents leaked to the prestigious magazine Semana last year. But Wikileaks tops those past revelations. In one cable, it is none other than General Oscar Naranjo, Colombia’s National Police Director and a well respected official around the world, telling the US Ambassador that the phone taps were ordered by the private secretary of President Uribe, Bernardo Moreno and the presidential advisor, Jose Obdulio Gaviria. Both officials were often thought to be behind the dubious activities that marked the government of President Uribe’s last year in office.
But again, the fact that the US Embassy and one of Colombia’s top police authorities reveal those charges as strong possibilities gives Colombian citizens more information than they had directly from their government officials.
Thus the contributions of Wikileaks are opening a window of transparency in societies where common citizens are not provided with the necessary information to make informed decisions about how their governments are operating.
09 Dec 10 | Americas, Mexico
It is hard to get shocked with Mexico’s daily news. But earlier this month viewers of Televisa, Mexico´s largest television network, were treated to a salacious news story: a well-known drug trafficker accusing Ricardo Ravelo, one of Mexico’s top police reporters who works for the magazine Proceso, of demanding USD 50,000 to stop writing about him. Sergio Villarreal Barragán, “El Grande”, or the big man, an enforcer for the Beltran Leyva drug clan who entered the protected witness system in Mexico, was shown on a video clip telling Mexican police how Ravelo and Proceso received money from drug traffickers. The video clip of the interview in which he makes the charges with the television network. The segment was aired on Wednesday without getting a response from Ravelo.
The journalist replied to the accusations the next morning, during an interview with radio personality Carmen Aristegui. In the interview Ravelo, an expert on drug trafficking, says the accusations are false and went one step further by accusing Televisa of working jointly with the government of Felipe Calderon. Last week, the magazine made accusations that the late Secretary of Interior Juan Camilo Mouriño had cut a deal with the top drug trafficker Joaquin “el chapo” Guzman of the Sinaloa Cartel. They said their sources were in the Mexican protected witness program.
The fight has many battle fronts: one is confrontation between the pro-establishment Televisa television network and Proceso magazine, a leftist publication that started the media revolution in this country in 1976, as a response to the one party system. Neither of these news organisations look eye to eye. The other is the fact that Ravelo and the magazine Proceso often use documents filtered to them by sources in the government that quote protected witnesses, and accuse prominent people in the country of misdeeds and collaborations with drug traffickers without further evidence. Ravelo often uses as sources protected witnesses who are former drug traffickers, as in the case of Villareal.
In a country where proving accusations is often difficult for the government and especially for the press, using protected witnesses as sources has become more difficult after this media spat. However, the country has sophisticated access to information laws, but the government often does not release any information on security issues. And discussion over the drug war is divided along political lines drafted between leftist and rightist politics. The discussion over the drug war, and attacks against enterprising journalist like Ravelo could become the norm in the future.
