At Camp CR3

For just over two years now, 96 families have been living here in dusty tents mounded with loose earth, put together with grey USAID tarps and whatever other materials they have salvaged. There are plenty of trees in what was once a verdant piece of land in the Bourdon district of Port au Prince, but by now the terrain has been broken up and transformed into rubble by the constant movement of hundreds of people.
For a while they were getting food and other supplies from a few international NGOs. “The Red Cross also brought us Aquatabs and soap,” said one of the camp’s committee members Massillon Mikel-Ange, “because of cholera.” But that help has completely dried up. For the NGOs, the emergency in Haiti is over. And like most of the residents of the capital, people here must buy their water, along with food, fuel and everything else. There is no school and few families can afford to send their children to schools outside the camp.
Indeed pretty much the only person visiting them these days is the land owner, a Monsieur Accra, who has been threatening them ever more forcefully to leave. A few families have done so, moving back to damaged and dangerous housing, and leaving the rocky clearing among the tents where Massillon and I spoke among the small crowd that had gathered around to listen.
“The people here, who are still here, had all been renting (before the earthquake)” said Massillon, “and those buildings are gone.”
That leaves the families of CR3 in the same sitaution as some half a million other people, only 25,000 of whom have been given permanent homes, according to a recent article in the New Internationalist by Nick Harvey (and which I highly reccommend.) In spite of the vast amount of money donated by concerned people all over the world, they remain in precarious housing with no sevices and no tenure rights. The entire notion of Building Back Better — to which former president Bill Clinton, the United States government and others seemed to have committed themselves — has been abandoned — as abandoned as the people in CR3.
On the day before the second anniversary of the earthquake, said Massillon, all the camp residents went on a protest march with thousands of others it has left homeless. “We started out at the airport then passed the National Palace and ended up at the Parliament,” he said. “We were demanding that the Presidency give us lodging. They have found lots of land to build factories. Why not for us?”

I tried to imagine CR3 as a place where 96 families might live in simple, two-storey apartment buildings with green space among them and the many trees. But when I mentioned the thought to Massillon, he threw up his hands in amazement that I would even consider such a miraculous occurrence. “No, that will never happen,” he said.

The Year Begins with a Song …

My first blog post of the new year, 2012, arrives rather late — although I do have some justification. One example of that is the fact that I am getting ready to go to Haiti for three weeks to begin research for my next book. Naturally this has me nervous and stressed and excited and curious — all at the same time. My greatest fear is that I will arrive in Port au Prince to find that something very useful and basic has been forgotten and left behind, as I searched for people to look after the stray cat that has adopted our house as his home after many years on the street, or started contacting people who have either written about Haiti or are working there — or tried to finish one last article for the Globe and Mail.

So while there are all kinds of things I’d like to write about, I haven’t had time to think about any one of them too much.

That means that today’s posting is pretty simple. Visitors to the Global Kiosk might recall a previous posting about a wonderful and unique effort on the part of an organization called The Voice Project to support communities in northern Uganda bring home children, kidnapped and abused by the nefarious and utterly evil Lord’s Resistance Army.

Last month I tried to make a donation to TVP only to find that without a United States credit card this wasn’t possible. I waited until a recent trip to New York to ask an American resident there to do this for me, only to find that Hey! The site has been fixed to accept donations from other countries!

I think this is great news and want to let others know that if you are in Canada, or the U.K., you can easily make a donation to this incredible effort — one that is working. (The Acholi language songs created by bereft mothers are being spread through small radio stations in bordering countries, bringing home ever larger numbers of young people, who say they knew it was safe to run away and come back home thanks to these poignant messages from afar.)

So have another look at The Voice Project website. Check out the covers sung by great artists of songs they like. And click on the ‘Donate’ banner to send a few dollars their way, so that community-managed projects supported by your generosity can provide these refugees from horror new livelihoods and new lives.

Selling Land, Stealing Livelihoods

Today the International Land Coalition released a report they and several other organizations joined together to produce on the buying up of arable land in poor nations for immense personal and corporate profit. Think of a country where protests erupt — like Egypt — or where donors send money to help the poverty stricken — almost everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa — and you will find rural families’ inability to make a living at the root of their poverty. While they own tiny parcels of land that don’t allow them to eat, let alone prosper, either wealthy families or the state itself control extremely large swathes of it.

So the report and its findings make for dire news indeed. In fact, it’s hard to know where to begin. Researchers found purchase or lease deals adding up to 203 million hectares between 2000 and 2010, most of them in Africa. While 78 per cent of those deals they were able to cross-reference went to agriculture, only about a quarter was destined for the cultivation of food. The rest was for revenue-rich bio-fuel production.

Other scary conclusions include the fact the best, most fertile land is usually targeted for lease or purchase; that poor farmers are being dispossessed of both land held by custom and access to water; that rural women are particularly vulnerable; and that extensive areas of natural ecosystems are being felled for bio-fuel, tourism, industrial projects and so on.

“The competition for land is becoming increasingly global and increasingly unequal,” said ILC Director Madiodio Niasse in a press release from the International Institute for Environment and Development. “Weak governance, corruption and a lack of transparency in decision-making, which are key features of the typical environment in which large-scale land acquisitions take place, mean that the poor gain few benefits from these deals but pay high costs.”

I have posted twice already about these ‘new enclosures’ and written about foreign companies coming in to desperately poor nations to make use of their best land. But apparently, national elites – who are often let off the hook for taxes in order to attract investment — are playing a far larger role in land grabbing than previously thought.

What else lies behind this pernicious trend that will only deepen rural poverty in the third world?

It is actually the same political and economic structure that has people protesting from Wall Street to West Africa: the notion that financial elites know what is best for the rest of us. It simply flies in the face of common sense to think we should help the poor of the developing world with meager handouts and let big business convert their land into mega-estates.

But as the IIED’s Lorenzo Cotula (one of the report’s authors) put it, “Part of the problem is … that many policymakers think small-scale farming has no future and that large scale, intensive agriculture is the best way to achieve food security and support national development.”

Personally, I don’t think many policy makers truly believe that. I can’t help but surmise instead that affluent nation governments and the corporations that donate to their legislators think that there are still more ways to squeeze what little they have out of the world’s poorest.

Tags: Africa, Third World poverty, social movements, rural poverty Africa, overseas development assistance, International Land Coalition

Average People and the Impact of Mexico’s Drug War

Today I have to bring some attention to a very interesting interactive posting on the website of The Guardian. It gives some well-deserved space to different people suffering in different ways the impact of organized crime in Mexico — and by the government’s poorly thought out and executed attempts to reign in the murderous mayhem.

Do their statements help us better understand the nature of what seems like an inexplicable and obscure phenomenon? To a certain extent, they do, I think because they illustrate both the immensity of the business — the vast sums of money, the ability to buy off major power brokers — and the picayune, quotidian aspect. And by that, I mean, the gangs of small-timers linked to bigger cartels or acting independently, carrying out kidnappings and extortions, and of course, retailing drugs.

Who are not, to my knowledge ever investigated, are the legitimate companies involved in the cartels’ support network. Edgardo Buscaglia talked about it when I was working on an article in THIS magazine last year but for which there wasn’t space.

“The main link between political corruption and organized crime goes through legal businesses in Mexico,” he told me. “They provide the logistical structure for (it) to operate. Some provide the transportation infrastructure for organized crime to move weapons, people and drugs, and storage infrastructure. They provide the distribution infrastructure, so drugs from here can reach Canada. Or people — they provide the production infrastructure.”

Today, another legal expert I interviewed for that article, John Mills Ackerman, has an interesting Op Ed piece in The Daily Beast. As he says in the piece, “There are no signs that organized crime actually has been weakened since the present Mexican president came to power in 2006. To the contrary, the cultivation and use of drugs in Mexico has risen dramatically, organized crime groups now have more firepower than ever before, money is freely laundered in the country and the impunity rate has reached an historic high, with, at most, 5 percent of all crimes receiving punishment.”

The situation is so out-of -control that, guess who is now seeking to move to Mexico? Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saadi. Having escaped trial and punishment for his various crimes in Libya, it looks like he thinks he will be right at home in Mexico.

Tags: drug violence in Mexico, Mexico Organized Crime

Enrique Peña Nieto’s Sarah Palin Moment

Photo by Ricardo Carreon

The ribbing Mexican presidential pre-candidate Enrique Peña Nieto is taking right now is the subject of today’s admittedly schadenfreude-flavoured blog post.

Yet the predicament of this weirdly handsome-but-not really, Astro-Boy favourite of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party  says a great deal about politics and politicians in that troubled land.

First the facts: Peña Nieto is the former governor of the State of Mexico, and nephew of another former governor, Arturo Montiel, whose full-on process of illegal enrichment ended in 2005, when PRI forces lined up against him. Now, thanks to the generalized disenchantment with President Felipe Calderon and the current ruling party, polls are putting Peña Nieto well ahead of any other contender.

Peña Nieto was at the renowned International Book Fair in Guadalajara last weekend to promote a book — Mexico: the Great Hope — he has ostensibly written. When asked by a member of the audience to name three books that influenced him, he was stymied.  Books? After some prevarication and floundering, one book, the Bible, did finally spring to his mind.

The event has since given rise to a number of jocular posters, with messages like: “Don’t give Peña Nieto your vote. Give him a book.”

It also reminded Proceso magazine’s Alvaro Delgado today of an episode three years ago when another politician gave Peña Nieto a book he’d written. “I really don’t like to read,” he told the author, according to Delgado. “I’ll ask my assistants to write up some flash cards with its most important points.”

Even more newsworthy however are the comments Peña Nieto’s teenage daughter, Paulina, posted afterwards on Twitter, describing his critics as a “bunch of idiots who only form part of the proletariat and only criticize those they envy.”

Peña Nieto’s soap opera-actress wife, Angelica Rivera,  no intellectual giant herself, also used her 140 characters for a few harsh sentiments: “Osea (sic), yo creo que si los indios quieren salir de donde están que se pongan a trabajar y dejen de estar de flojos o violentos, como en Atenco”.

Loosely translated, I can tell you she suggests that if the “Indians” want out of where they are (i.e. poverty) then they should damn well get to work and stop being lazy and violent.

If the fact that these representatives of Mexico’s ruling class didn’t stand an excellent chance of actually running the country by next year, all of this would be laughable. Instead, the prospect, in a nation that is primarily indigenous, is downright terrifying.

The entire incident shows not only the disdain in which anyone but the rich, the corrupt and now, the ignorant as well, are held by Mexico’s powerful political elite. It also shows their disdain for education in general. Thanks to its high dropout rate, the average educational level in Mexico is no more than Canada’s equivalent Grade 8.

While enrollment is high in primary schools, under teachers’ union president-for-life (and Peña Nieto mentor) Elba Esther Gordillo, resources are scarce, curricula hide-bound and academic performance low, with Mexican school children consistently scoring among the lowest of the OECD countries, and the lowest in Latin America.

University education is publicly funded, but there are nowhere near enough places for all who want to attend. Dropout rates are also extremely high, so that less than 10 per cent of Mexicans aged 18 and older holds a bachelor’s degree.

Aside from all that, however, as Delgado writes, “Peña Nieto’s ignorance isn’t only a bookish “error,” but also a conception of Mexico and the world in which ethical principles are subservient to the securing of one’s ends, no matter the means.”

The fact that an aspirant to the government of a country of more than 100 million people doesn’t like, and can’t be bothered, to read only highlights the thoughtlessness with which he plans to govern. The fact that he claims to have written a book and everyone is supposed to believe this, only highlights the lack of transparency and honesty in the entire political system.

Mexico doesn’t need an intellectual genius to head the government. But it does need an honest and capable and compassionate one. So while Peña Nieto’s gaffe may seem like farce, its implications are tragic.

Tags: Enrique Pena Nieto, Estado de Mexico, Mexican elections, Proceso

Strange Tales and Press Standards

I don’t know how many of my fellow journalists are following the Leveson Enquiry, an ongoing public investigation into the culture, practices and ethics of Britain’s press after the famous News of the World hacking scandal. But since I read the Guardian every day, quotes and headlines about it keep popping up and grabbing my attention.

The thing that gets me is the utter weirdness of it all. I can’t imagine — nor do I know any journalist, I don’t think, who could either — dressing up as a doctor and sneaking into a hospital to try and interview a celebrity. I also can’t imagine sitting down and just making up an entire story about someone I’ve never spoken to, complete with fake quotes, and seeing it the next day published as fact. I can’t imagine an editor coming up with the idea of sending a bunch of scantily clad women to surround and jeer a government minister, and turn that into an article as well.

I mean you go to school, follow the various courses, hone your writing skills and, at the end of your studies, get hired at a typical tabloid. Great! You’ve got a job, can start to pay off your student loan — and then your editor asks you to do this kind of stuff: ‘Here’s the number for Hugh Grant’s voice mail – listen in and write an article about what you hear.’ Or, ‘Rupert didn’t like his interview with (ITN broadcaster) Anne Diamond, so go out and dig up something so we can make her life hell.’

Yet, according to Enquiry submissions, these are the kinds of things tabloid journalists do all the time. Singer Charlotte Church, after being obliged to sing for free at media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s nuptials with Wendy Tang in return for good publicity, was instead constantly targeted in nasty, insinuating stories for years. The News of the World hacked the phones of  7/7 bomb victims, actors and the wife of then-PM Gordon Brown, whereby they learned — and printed a story about — how her new baby has cystic fibrosis.

And Rebekah Brooks, a Murdoch acolyte and close friend of Prime Minster David Cameron, humiliated Labour minister Clare Short by pasting a photo of her head over that of a topless woman and publishing it in the Sun. She sent a busload of semi-naked women to Ms. Short’s Birmingham home to harass her, and printed a headline saying “‘Fat, Jealous’ Clare Brands Page 3 Porn.”

Ms. Shorter must have done something truly heinous, truly damaging to the British public to merit such treatment, right? I mean, that’s how the tabloids defend themselves, suggesting that delving into the personal lives of British politicians and celebrities is in the public interest, and they are informing readers about their real morals and motivations.

In fact all Ms. Shorter had done was mention that she “did not care for” the Page 3 girls tabloid tradition and considered it “pornography.”

According to a former Daily Star freelancer and, later, employee, Richard Peppiatt, tabloid staffers were obliged to come up with three scandal-hued stories a week or face the boot. He told the Enquiry, “There is an overwhelming negativity and it runs throughout the press. A story is not a story unless it is knocking someone … or knocking an ethnic group, whatever it may be.” Yikes.

He also described the paper not so much truth-seeking as “ideologically-driven and … impact-driven.”

Well I can understand why editors and owners are blithely ruining the reputation of the press as a source of non-partisan information. But how can self-respecting journalists do this, day after day, and not lose their minds?

I guess I am thinking about this more than usual since writing a short guide to freelance journalism, which got me considering the reasons for wanting to be a journalist in the first place. The Leveson Enquiry is making me think even more about the importance I see in integrity, the importance of what journalists do — and how little this notion is shared, apparently, by my fellow scribes.

Now I have nothing against a bit of Onion-esque fun and am familiar with the old idiom about the media “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.” But is this what is happening? In an ever-tighter job market, what are journalism students and young writers to think when the business of newsgathering and commentary is such a zoo?

I acknowledge the need for journalists to try to expose the underlayer of governance and finance, to investigate what lies behind the decision and policy-making that affects the lives of everyone. But that doesn’t mean fining out with whom a politician is sleeping, but rather, from whom he or she is taking donations in exchange for favourable or biased treatment.

I still believe that journalism is one of the world’s most important professions. But after reading about the Leveson Enquiry, I only wish more media workers recognized what that implies about the way we carry out that profession. If more and more journalists simply to refuse to write ridiculous and unethical stories, maybe they can change that culture of “overwhelming negativity.”

To Speak to a Human, say ‘Human’.

I’ve had bear in silence for many years now the absurdity of trying to tell a disembodied voice answering a company’s phone who I need to speak to or why, trusting this gadgetry to do what an employee could do more quickly and efficiently. But last week, when I picked up a book at the local library, that practice hit a new low. I was pointed in the direction of a computer, actually beside the librarian, and told to check out my items myself.

The librarian who showed me this astonishingly ridiculous new system is herself, of course, likely to lose her job to it. Here in Toronto, our mayor and mostly right-ish city council, plan to reduce library hours and get rid of librarians along with numerous other city staff, in order to save us taxpayers money. Even more alarming, I will apparently be asked to pay now for swimming at the nearby community pool.

Now this structure, while unattractive, not exactly hygienic and in design similar to nothing so much as a pre-unification, East German sports facility, was at least convenient. Its presence encouraged me to keep fit. Because I could just pick up a towel and swimsuit, and walk there in seven minutes, I often managed to insert an hour of exercise into my already busy day. Will those facilities be improved with luxuries like heating in the change rooms and showers that work for longer than 3 seconds because of it? Highly unlikely. And now that I have to pay for the same crumby facilities, am I happy about it? No.

But we now have, in Canada’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, a mayor who is actually proud of the fact that he thinks so small.

Nickel-and-diming both us downtown users of city services and the staff that provide them, is his way of putting the brakes not only on costs but on Toronto’s urban ambitions.

The police force, for example, Mayor Rob Ford’s ideological heroes in spite of the fact that they have over the years experienced increasingly lower crime rates while earning increasingly fatter paychecks, remain the one big ticket item that will not be cut.

According to a missive I received from the mayor’s office, the police are trying to trim down. They are firing all of their cleaning staff and replacing them with out-sourced minimum-wage employees from a private company for a $500,000 saving. But their pay, and even their premium pay, will be barely touched. So people earning $30 or $40,000 a year will be fired so people earning $80 to $100,000 can keep their hefty salaries — for a saving of less than a per cent overall.

The thing about urban life, or even modern life, however, is that it gets better the more it is based on neighbourhood relationships — and on other members of our society — the people around you — earning a decent living. Like the nearby presence of a handy swimming pool, chatting with a human being for a few minutes at the library is part of what makes Toronto a great place to live. Books and sport, free English classes, parks and bike trails have all been (inexpensive) perks that make people I know in other cities, from Mexico to Jakarta — envious of what we have here.

But the same policies that make life more inconvenient and kind of alienating for the average person also help the so-called 1 percent and their fabulous tax breaks become richer, while growing poverty within the 99 per cent. You have only to check out a recent NYT editorial on poverty in the U.S. — improved Census Bureau stats show that 49.1 million Americans are poor while those barely above the line form a much larger group than previously thought — to realize how the Occupy Wall Street movement is right to gather and protest.

And speaking of the OWS folk, has anyone else noticed how many occupations — even as they are in some cases evicted from public spaces in a number of cities — maintained lending libraries? The Guardian recently did a photo slideshow of some of these, and Toronto’s (now in storage, I expect) yurt was one of the libraries featured.

If the unemployed and young place such importance on books and the ideas they carry, why doesn’t a wealthy city in the midst of a super growth spurt? If real estate prices are still booming thanks to thousands of new immigrants moving to live in Toronto, why are we paring and slicing away at our infrastructure? I have a feeling the answer is already there in the skewed economic stats we are now becoming familiar with. Rich people don’t borrow books or walk their dogs in public parks. They want to concentrate on accumulation, and make random human interaction a thing of the past.

Tags: art and social justice, grassroots organizations

A New Book…

… by me.
That’s right, I have ventured into the world of e-publishing with ‘Putting Awesome Into Words: A Freelancer’s Journey,’ a guide to freelancing for journalism students. I have been working on it off and on since the summer, and over the upcoming days plan to let teachers and professors in communications faculties know about it.

I’ve never done anything like this before, and I have to say, it has been fun. I have written down what I felt like saying and put it out into cyber space without any kind of intermediary. I hope to learn whether this kind of publishing is a worthwhile venture — in the sense that it provides a service to readers and one they take advantage of — or really just another version of the vanity press.
But if anyone is interested, they can find it right now at smashwords.com for a reasonable $2.99.

OpCartel Update

Well the person kidnapped by the Zetas cartel in Veracruz has been released — apparently at about the time I was posting last night.
But with that person came a chilling message for Anonymous — something along the lines of of ‘we will kill 10 people for every person you name.’ So the group has decided not to reveal any of the information they have.
Now some people are calling the hackers everything from cowards to ‘accomplices’ of the Zetas.
But please — let’s get real. It is the job of the Mexican government to deal with this dangerous criminal gang – not a bunch of computer geeks. They say they got the information from a Mexican government website in the first place. And that means authorities already know exactly what it contains — but have decided not to do anything about it. So — who are the cowards and accomplices now?

Tags: Mexico, Mexico Organized Crime

A Wiki-Solution to Mexico’s Narco-Nightmare?

(Photo courtesy of gato-gato-gato)

The hacker collective Anonymous had me all agog earlier this week after I watched a video one of their members — wearing one of the eerily smiling V is for Vendetta Guy Fawkes masks – had posted on YouTube. In it he threatened to expose a vast collection of covert information concerning the evil drug cartel, the Zetas, who had, he said, kidnapped one of the group’s members in Veracruz.

“You have made a great mistake by taking one of us,” said the masked man. “Free him.”

The information Anonymous said it would leak in what it is calling OpCartel includes the addresses of properties and businesses the Zetas own, along with the names and personal details of every policeman, journalist and politician on their payroll, even those of cab drivers who work for them.

I wondered if such a thing could possibly happen. The story has been vox populi in Mexico all week, according to a source. The idea that a flood of incriminating facts finally exposing all those enriching themselves through organized crime while pretending to fight it was too tempting to believe. Since the Mexican government began its blitz against the cartels, an estimated 50,000 people have died – many of them innocent civilians. Indeed, apparently Anonymous’s source is 25,000 emails stolen from the Mexican government.

But in the days following the revelation of the video, however, new articles have suggested that other Anonymous ‘hacktivists’ are saying ”Whoa.” They admitted that a) it could get them killed and b) with no real way of verifying all that data, it could allow rival cartel members to attack yet more innocent people.

Now, it seems that OpCartel is still on. At least, that is according to a form Anonymous guy named Barrett Brown, who left the group but is still in contact with them. He said that Anonymous had discussed and voted on the matter and decided, in the end, to press on.

So tomorrow, the day before Guy Fawkes Day, we will find out if the threat to blow up the Zetas (could other cartels be exposed in the future?) is real. And of course, if so, what happens next. I’m curious, but sceptical. Barrett Brown also told SecurityNews Daily that a secondary goal of the operation is “to see the Mexican people arm themselves and rise up against the cartels and their government.” It’s a great idea but I’m skeptical of that too. But at least someone is trying to attack the problem at its roots – the nexus between organized crime and the powers-that-be.

Tags: Mexico Organized Crime