Welcome to Mexico’s surreal elections
“Those who are qualified to govern have robbed us blind,” says Pato Zambrano, a former Big brother contestant running for mayor of Monterrey.
With a football legend, a famous clown, a former Big Brother contestant and several soap stars in the running, the list of candidates in Mexico’s forthcoming elections reads more like the line-up of a television panel show. But the emergence of these maverick contenders reflects a growing sense of disillusionment, which has been compounded by a high-profile movement to boycott the elections.
Exploited by business owners, threatened by drug cartels and abandoned by the authorities, the inhabitants of Cloete, a tiny mining town in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, are living precariously.
“What you are experiencing is the result of human evil, of abuse, political alliances and economic power,” said Raúl Vera López, the Bishop of Saltillo, at the inauguration of the humble Familia Pasta de Conchos offices in Cloete on Sunday.
The Familia Pasta de Conchos is a human rights organization that advocates on behalf of local mining families. It was founded in 2006, after an explosion at the nearby Pasta de Conchos coal mine left 65 workers dead.
Nine years on from that disaster, Cloete’s 4,000 residents continue to fight for the survival of their community. Another 106 workers have died in the years since – the result of “poor hygiene and safety standards, corrupt inspectors and negligence at all three levels of government,” according to Familia Pasta de Conchos.
Now Cloete itself is at risk, as local officials permit shady mining firms to destroy vital infrastructure – including roads, rivers, drainage and electricity pylons – in order to extract more coal from beneath the town. The mining firms were even on the point of destroying several homes until Familia Pasta de Conchos opened its office in the town in a bid to stop them.
“People didn’t used to speak out because they were really scared. They were threatened and beaten, and they still receive threats, but they’re daring to speak out now,” Cristina Auerbach, a human rights advocate from Familia Pasta de Conchos, told Latin Correspondent…
The Mexican government’s inability to maintain law and order is having a major impact on access to higher education in the drug violence-ravaged northeast of the country.
According to a report by Mexico’s Proceso magazine, a wave of extortion, kidnappings and even killings of university students by vicious drug cartels in the states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Coahuila has forced the closure of several universities.
The breakdown in security has also fueled a major exodus, with thousands of students leaving the region to complete their studies in safer parts of Mexico or across the border in the United States.
For the last two years, the Gulf Cartel and its fearsome former armed wing Los Zetas have demanded that universities in Tamaulipas pay them 100,000 to 350,000 pesos (US$6,500 to $22,900) per month in return for “protection,” Proceso reported.
The extortion has led to the closure of two campuses run by the private University of the Valley of Mexico (UVM), while Mexico’s Chamber of Commerce has denounced threats against another 18 universities in the region…
Click here to read this article in full at Latin Correspondent.
The Tequila Files 