Letter from Mexico

“I am so happy we could be of service,” says a neighbor here in Oaxaca. “And to think that our army actually was able to cross the border, for the first time since Pancho Villa and General Santa Anna, and this time with relief supplies and not arms, well, that is a special bonus for me.”

The conversation started the way most conversations do down here: with a question.”You are an American?.”

Yes, I replied, but I live here. Have, for over 10 years. Retired; get a small pension; have a wife; do a little writing: all in response to further questions. My neighbor (well, sort of, he lives “in the city”) is an engineer, works for the electric company, was born in Chihuahua state, has a wife, three children. A daughter and her husband live in Mexico city, and the other two live here, one with them, and another by himself.

Soon, we are talking politics. Mexicans are, in my experience, avidly interested in figuring out the American heart. They are fascinated with the contrast in views between most of the gringos they meet and the policies of the US government. How is it, they wonder, that we can be so anti-war, so anti-Bush, and yet the war goes on and Bush appears to be pursuing his policies with ever-greater enthusiasm and with little meaningful challenge. Indeed, I tell him, I often wonder that myself.

The subject has turned to Katrina. He is referring to the Mexican soldiers who, with much fanfare on this side of the border, crossed the Rio Bravo (Rio Grande to you) last month to assist in the refugee effort in San Antonio Texas. A very small effort considering the magnitude of the problem, he volunteers, but symbolically potent. “It shows that even the most powerful country in the world has a need sometimes for help.” And really, that is what the conversation is about: the relief, personal and political, that many feel, upon realizing that there is after all a soft underbelly to the armored beast that rides their shoulders. “Nobody should have to suffer such tragic destruction as you have,” he says. “I feel great sympathy for the victims. Still, any sign of weakness gives us hope that maybe your government will see there are limits, even to its' power, and stop trying to extend the Empire any further.”

“I was in Mexico City when the earthquake hit, twenty years ago. I know what urban disaster looks like. I know what it smells like. I was a student at the University. Our dormitory building fell down. Friends of mine were killed. The government was useless. There was almost no aid, certainly no attempt at organizing anything. We had to do it for ourselves. The lessons were not lost on us: that we could not wait for the government to help us; that the help that we were supposed to get was often given away to the friends of the politicians; that God helps only those who help themselves.”

I asked him about the theory, espoused by many analysts, that the government's failures to hold contractors to anti-quake specifications, combined with the chaotic government response to the quake itself, was the beginning of the end for the ruling PRI party, resulting in the loss of the Presidency in 2000. “I have no doubt that it is true,” he told me. “Of course, that was not the only thing. There was the Zapatista uprising in 1994, and the big Peso devaluation in 1995, and many smaller failures. But the beginning, yes, it was in the way we organized ourselves, almost against the wishes of the government, and showed ourselves that it was pointless being loyal to that political system when it could not—or would not—do anything for the poor and middle class people.”

“Another thing that our government did, just like yours: we got very little help from outside. Not out of ideology, like yours. From corruption. Hundreds of tons of goods never reached the people who were supposed to get them. Sometimes, it was because nobody on the other side could—or could bring themselves to—figure out who to bribe to allow it to cross the border. Sometimes, it was because the shipments got ‘diverted’ by the Army or the federal police. Sometimes stuff that got to the neighborhood was grabbed by the local caciques (bosses) and given to their friends and supporters. Your government turned down doctors from Cuba, oil from Venezuela, even corn from the Zapatistas. To us, there is little difference. In both cases, people died who didn't have to.”

Perhaps, I suggest, Katrina will be our earthquake. Perhaps our politicians, like Mexico's in 1985, have sewn the seeds of their own fall from power. Perhaps, he says. “I just hope it doesn't take you as long as it is taking us. The rest of the world might not be able to last for twenty more years of American empire.”