Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Fall 2009

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Latin Latin American American Studies Studies

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SPRING 2010 2007 FALL 2009 – WINTER

Chile Heads Right U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum The Making of a Maestro

Table of Contents

Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies Fall 2009 – Winter 2010 Comment

Harley Shaiken

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Kirsten Sehnbruch

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Brian Palmer-Rubin

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Jude Joffe-Block and Brian Palmer-Rubin

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Christopher M. Jones

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Lawrence Rinder Interviews Fernando Botero

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Wendy Muse Sinek

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Kirsten Sehnbruch

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Culture and Politics in the Honduran Coup

Rosemary Joyce

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Presumed Guilty: Based on an Untrue Story

Mary Ellen Sanger

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Photo from El Paranal, Chile

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Chile Heads Right A Tale of Two Economies Peering Behind the Curtain Headwinds for Climate Change Policy The Making of a Maestro Silver or Lead: Confronting the Business of Violence The Bachelet Bounce

“La noche está estrellada” The Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies is published by the Center for Latin American Studies, 2334 Bowditch Street, Berkeley, CA 94720.

Chair

Harley Shaiken Acting Vice Chair

Editor and Publications Coordinator

Dionicia Ramos

Jean Spencer

Program Coordinator

Design and Layout

Beth Perry

Greg Louden

Special thanks to former CLAS staff members Sara

E. Lamson, Jacqueline Sullivan and Matt Werner.

Contributing Editor: Deborah Meacham Additional thanks to: Carla Aguirre, Lucinda Barnes, Dena Beard, Lisa Calden, Sean Carson, Genevieve Cottraux, Daniella Chudler, Vanessa Gatihi, Sharon Gibbons, Lupe Gomez-Downing, Roberto Hernández, Cristina Lleras Figueroa, Tim Lynch, Layda Negrete, Jessica Occhialini, Ernesto Ottone, Rosa Ovshinsky, Stan Ovshinsky, Michael Prete, Lawrence Rinder, Annie Rochfort, Freya Saito, Massimo Tarenghi, Breidi Truscott and Susan Urrutia.

Contributing Photographers: Marceloa Agost, Julie Akers, Ed Carsi, Sandra Cuffe, Jeroen Elfferfich, Will Klinger, Anirudh Koul, mañsk, Matty Nematollahi, Alex E. Proimos, Peg Skorpinski, Jonathan Tobin, Eneas De Troya, Rob Verhoeven and Lisa de Vreede.

Front cover: Street scene around La Fuente de los Faroles, Zacatecas.

Photo by Eneas De Troya.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

Comment We go to press with this Review in the aftermath of two devastating earthquakes. The quake in Haiti was a natural disaster that became a social catastrophe, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and displaced and crippling the economy. The unusually strong terremoto in Chile — 8.8 on the moment magnitude scale — resulted in hundreds of dead and severe economic disruption. The disasters saw an outpouring of aid from throughout the Americas, but the grueling challenge of rebuilding lies ahead for both countries. We plan to look at the context of the disasters and the options for the future in upcoming Reviews.

We begin with a political upheaval: the end of two decades of center-left governance in Chile and the election of Sebastián Piñera, a candidate of the right. While the Piñera victory was hardly a surprise, the new president faces the tasks of reconstruction on top of the challenge of constituting a new government. Kirsten Sehnbruch lays out the possibilities in “Chile Heads Right.” Sehnbruch, a senior fellow at CLAS and now a professor of Public Policy at the Universidad de Chile, also examines the historic legacy of the Bachelet presidency in this edition.

This Review also reflects on the many challenges facing Mexico and the United States. Four articles examine

the bilateral relationship from different angles, including: the economic collapse and its impact on both countries; the growing importance of issues of transparency and accountability; energy and the environment; and the horrific escalation of violence associated with the drug wars. All of these issues were part of the discussion at the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum, organized by CLAS and ITAM and held at Berkeley in the fall of 2009.

Rosemary Joyce, a UC Berkeley Anthropology professor, writes about “Culture and Politics in the Honduran Coup.” Joyce has done path-breaking anthropological research in Honduras for three decades and brings unusual depth and cultural understanding to this look at a contemporary political disaster.

Finally, we present a conversation between Fernando Botero and Lawrence Rinder, director of the Berkeley Art Museum, about the world-renowned artist’s life and work.

Botero was in Berkeley to open an exhibit showing 60 of his extraordinary Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings that he has donated to UC Berkeley. Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau presented him with the Chancellor’s Citation, one of the university’s highest awards.

— Harley Shaiken

Photo by Matty Nematollahi.

Harley Shaiken with members of the U.S.-Mexico Futures Forum walking across the Berkeley campus, fall 2009.

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Article Title

Chileans go to the polls.

Photo by Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty Images.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Photo by Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty Images.

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

ELECTION 2010

Sebastián Piñera demonstrates his soccer skills.

Chile Heads Right

by Kirsten Sehnbruch

O

n January 19, 2010, two decades of government by the Concertación, Chile’s center-left coalition, came to an end. The triumphant winner of the election, Sebastián Piñera, received the congratulations of the outgoing president, Michelle Bachelet, and the defeated Concertación candidate, Eduardo Frei, while his supporters took to the streets to celebrate, honking the horns of their shiny SUVs. The pelolais, upper-class girls with glossy hair and high heels, got lost downtown near Plaza Italia because they had never before ventured beyond the confines of Santiago’s four high-income districts.

More disconcertingly, portraits of Chile’s former dictator,

Augusto Pinochet, appeared from nowhere to line the streets in some wealthy areas of town.

It was a rare display of upper-class celebration in a city that continues to be marked by the stark contrast between a few shiny skyscrapers and the humble homes of the majority of its population. These unusual images prompt the question: How did a left-of-center coalition that has made extraordinary progress in every policy area lose an election, even as its extremely popular outgoing president clocked up record approval ratings?

The result of this election was by no means a foregone conclusion, despite the poor performance of >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Photo courtesy of Marco Enríquez-Ominami.

Marco Enríquez-Ominami on the campaign trail.

the Concertación’s candidate, Eduardo Frei, in the first round. In fact, considering that the coalition has spent the last 20 years in government, the election result was impressive: rather than a resounding victory for the right, Piñera won the presidency by a 3 percent margin and did not obtain the majority he needed in both houses of Congress to prevent the Concertación from being able to block legislation.

Still, the Concertación lost the presidency.

Four immediate reasons spring to mind. First, 20 years in office, no matter how well executed, is a long time for any government. Tired of seeing the same faces on TV for the last two decades (and even longer if we consider the Concertación’s role as opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship), the Chilean electorate wanted change. During the last 20 years, Chile has evolved beyond recognition, as have the aspirations of its population. Twenty years ago, the main issue was poverty. Now, Chileans are more concerned with the country’s persistently high levels of inequality and access to higher education and health care.

The irony of the situation is that the Concertación changed Chile faster than it adapted to that change itself.

The ad-hoc candidacy of a relatively unknown congressman, Marco Enríquez-Ominami, is a testimony BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

to how fed up Chileans have become with traditional politics. Formerly a member of the Socialist party, Enríquez-Ominami broke with the Concertación to run as an independent, garnering an astonishing 20.1 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections. His candidacy, which came about due to a lack of democratic decision-making within the Concertación, was the second factor contributing to the coalition’s defeat: EnríquezOminami split the vote in the first round of the elections and then failed to give Frei his wholehearted support in the second round.

The third problem lay with the Concertación’s candidate. In a year when the electorate demanded change, Eduardo Frei was a throwback. Not only had he previously served as president (1994-2000), he is also the son of a former president. The drawbacks of Frei’s association with the past were compounded by his lack of personal pizzazz.

In a democracy in which the personalities of presidents increasingly decide election results, the reliable, competent, but nevertheless lackluster figure of Frei did little to pull in votes for the Concertación.

While a candidate with a stronger personality would undoubtedly have made a difference in this election, the fourth reason for the Concertación’s loss is probably the

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

most critical. Chile’s binominal election system, in which two candidates from each competing coalition stand in each district, almost automatically guarantees the victory of at least one candidate from the governing and one from the opposition coalition in every electoral district. This leads to a system of pre-negotiated democracy, in which who wins depends more on which candidate is set to compete against which coalition partner than on any real competition between political coalitions. The resultant jockeying for candidacy strains the unity of the coalition.

Moreover, the inertia that this system generates prevents the emergence of younger politicians: candidacies are awarded by party elders, rather than being the result of any organic grassroots process.

This system of negotiated democracy has undoubtedly led to cronyism and a degree of clientelism within the coalitions, even though actual corruption rates in Chile remain very low. This phenomenon has been more visible to the electorate in the case of the Concertación because these party negotiations have been replicated within the governing administration, leading to the impression that

offices are filled according to political connections rather than merit.

In addition, this system prevents political renewal, as it is difficult for outsiders to break into party negotiations or to set up independent candidacies. It also explains why political parties in Chile are so poorly regarded by the electorate and magnifies why 20 years in office, an extraordinary feat in itself, left voters looking for change.

The big question now is whether Sebastián Piñera will really be able to institute the changes he promised in the short four-year presidential term, which does not allow for consecutive reelections. These promises include recovering economic growth rates of 6 percent per annum, generating one million decent jobs, privatizing a portion of the state copper company, reforming the government, reducing crime and taking a tougher judicial approach to criminals.

Since Piñera does not have a clear majority in either house of Congress, the Concertación could mount a strong opposition to any policies it does not favor. Furthermore, Piñera will have to face the difficulty of balancing the interests within his coalition. His own party, Renovación >>

Photo courtesy of Eduardo Frei.

Eduardo Frei speaks to supporters.

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Chile Heads Right

Photo by Lisa de Vreede.

Piñera supporters celebrate victory.

Nacional (National Renewal, RN), has more senators, but his coalition partner, the Unión Democrática Independiente (Independent Democratic Union, UDI) has twice as many deputies and clearly expects to play an important role in his government. Therefore, the first dilemma Piñera will face is how to balance these pressures, particularly since many of the UDI’s members are so closely linked to the former dictator, Augusto Pinochet. The question of whether Piñera would include politicians in his administration who had also participated in Pinochet’s government caused a lot of tension during the final days before the presidential election. Although Piñera knows that any association with the dictatorship is politically dangerous, he also has to keep his coalition partners happy. Just as presidents Lagos and Bachelet had to prove that the left is no longer the left of Salvador Allende, Piñera has to prove that the right is no longer the right of Augusto Pinochet.

Piñera’s cabinet nominations show that he is well aware of these issues. Out of a cabinet of 22 ministers, Piñera only picked eight from his coalition parties. One minister, BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Jaime Ravinet, is a long-standing Christian Democrat and a former minister in the Lagos administration.

The remaining 13 ministers are not party militants but independent technocrats. By selecting a cabinet with such a large number of independent ministers, Piñera is sending several clear signals: first, he is relegating political parties to a position of secondary importance. Second, he is demonstrating that he has selected his ministers for their qualifications and levels of expertise rather than to satisfy party quotas. Third, his nominations distance his government from the Pinochet dictatorship and force the parties that back him to follow this shift towards the political center. Fourth, the fact that most of the new ministers come from high-level management positions in the private sector demonstrates Piñera’s desire to introduce a change of attitude and greater efficiency into Chile’s public sector. Fifth, governing with members of the opposition in key ministerial positions demonstrates Piñera’s desire to establish a government of national unity, a new concept in Chilean politics, where the lines between government and opposition have never yet been crossed.

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

So far, Piñera’s strategy constitutes a high-risk political gamble. As yet, it is too early to say whether he will win or lose. Appointing cabinet ministers without political experience or party endorsement could backfire.

The same goes for appointing ministers from the private sector who have obvious conf licts of interest between their new and their old positions. Again, this is untested ground for Chile’s post-transition democracy, which will have to find transparent mechanisms for managing these conf licts of interest.

It is clear that Piñera is betting on the unity and political discipline of his coalition, which will be driven by a desire to win the 2014 election and thus definitively break the Concertación’s stranglehold on power. If his cabinet functions smoothly and successfully, this unity is likely to hold. Problems could arise if the new cabinet makes mistakes or is faced with unexpected popular unrest.

Chile’s immediate political future will also depend to a significant extent on the role of President Bachelet, who could potentially stand for reelection in 2014. While her overwhelming approval ratings make her a potential candidate, the clamor for generational change, together with the lack of political unity in a Concertación that

needs to regroup and rethink, could have an impact on the race.

In any case, the 2014 elections will be very different from past elections: an electoral reform is likely to be passed that will no longer require people to register to vote.

Registration will become automatic while the actual voting will become voluntary. At present, voters are not obliged to register, and many choose not to, but once they do, it is mandatory for them to vote in every subsequent election or they may be fined. This means that young people, who since 1990 have generally not bothered to register to vote, will be able to do so without going through the previously required administrative steps. It also means that many of those who currently get out and vote may stay home.

These changes will have an unpredictable impact on voting patterns, so in 2014 anything could happen.

Kirsten Sehnbruch is a professor of Public Policy at the Instituto de Asuntos Publicos, Universidad de Chile.

Photo by Claudio Santana/AFP/Getty Images.

The new president faces unforeseen challenges: fishing boats cast ashore by a tsunami, February 2010.

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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The U.S.–Mexico

Futures Forum

A project of CLAS and ITAM Sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Diana fountain, Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City.

(Photo by Anirudh Koul.)

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

Photo by Jeroen Elfferfich.

Foreclosure sign in Salton City, California.

U.S.– MEXICO FUTURES FORUM

A Tale of Two Economies

by Brian Palmer-Rubin

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he Great Recession has underscored how closely the economic fates of Mexico and the United States are intertwined, with oil, immigration and manufacturing playing lead roles in this tale of two economies. Mexico shares nearly 2,000 miles of border with its northern neighbor, and a substantial portion of the country’s income is made up of oil and manufacturing exports to the United States and remittance checks sent home by workers who have immigrated to the world’s largest economy. Mexico inevitably experiences crippling shock waves when the U.S. economy falters.

The current economic downturn is no exception.

Mexico’s economy has been the hardest hit in Latin America; its GDP dropped 10 percent from the second quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009. Furthermore, the crisis has uncovered serious structural flaws in both

countries’ economies that are likely to inhibit a full recovery, according to the panelists who led a discussion on the Global Economic Crisis at the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum.

Presenters included Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley; J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley; and Isaac Katz, Professor of Economics at the Instituto Tecnólogico Autónomo de México (ITAM).

Although much attention has been paid in congressional hearings and in the media to the proximate causes of the crisis in the U.S. — subprime lending and overreach by banks — careful analysis reveals root causes that extend at least as far back as the Reagan administration. Reich and DeLong identified the regressive tax reforms of the 1980s and the Federal Reserve Bank’s hands-off approach to overseeing financial institutions as factors that precipitated the downturn. The two experts made the case that the U.S. >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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economy, once lauded as the pinnacle of capitalism, faces serious structural problems.

Most dire is the concentration of wealth in recent decades, which has led to anemic demand. Because those with lower incomes spend a higher percentage of their earnings, Reich explained, the concentration of income at the top has hindered consumption. He also posited that growing inequality played a substantial role in the subprime mortgage crisis, as middle-class Americans accumulated unmanageable levels of debt in response to rising housing prices and stagnant wages.

The hubris of the Federal Reserve Bank regarding its ability to avert large-scale crises is also to blame for the current situation, DeLong maintained. After more than half a century without a severe economic crisis in the U.S., the Fed under Chairman Alan Greenspan (1987-2006) endorsed financial deregulation, confident in the stability of self-regulating financial markets. This optimism carried over into the term of Ben Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor.

As a result of this miscalculation, said DeLong, the Fed did not intervene quickly enough and did not have the right tools to take effective action when important financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, began to fail.

While many experts predict that the U.S. economy will stabilize by 2010, formally ending the current recession,

Reich and DeLong did not see great prospects for a boost in the level of aggregate demand. For Mexico, this spells bad news. Though demand for oil, Mexico’s most important export, is expected to rebound, one-fifth of Mexico’s economy is based on manufacturing exports to the U.S., a less-promising sector. Since the 1980s, Mexico has implemented an export-led growth model for economic development. As a result, over the past 20 years, the share of foreign trade has doubled, from about one-third of GDP to roughly two-thirds, according to Reich. It follows that low demand north of the border would lead to declining employment and income south of the border. In Reich’s words, “Mexico is sleeping with an elephant, and the elephant is very sick.”

Even more disconcerting, there is reason to doubt that economic recuperation in the U.S. will be paralleled in Mexico.

With stubbornly low levels of demand among American consumers, Mexico’s industrial sector is unlikely to lead the way to economic recovery, said DeLong. Moreover, the most viable potential “leading sectors” in generating extra demand in the United States — government health care and import-substitution manufacturing — offer little in the way of support for Mexican production. According to several indicators — GDP, employment, government revenue — Mexico has been the Latin American country hardest hit by the economic crisis. Katz offered two explanations for the

Declining demand from the United States has affected Mexico’s export industry.

Photo by Jonathan Tobin.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Photo by Gregory Bull/AP Photo.

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

Guillermo Ortiz, president of the Bank of Mexico, with a graph of his country’s GDP growth over the last few years.

severe impact south of the Rio Grande. First, he echoed Reich and DeLong in noting that Mexico is the country whose economy is most closely linked to the U.S. through trade and remittances. Second, Katz argued that Mexico’s economy has a particularly inefficient incentive structure, which stunts research and development and hinders competition.

Two key economic sectors are illustrative of the inefficiencies in the Mexican market system. First, Pemex, the state-owned oil company, is stuck with aging infrastructure and limited resources for investment, as its coffers are regularly raided by the federal government to pay for social programs. Second, lenient competition policy for public utilities has led to inflated prices and spotty service, hampering the growth of all business sectors that rely on those services. Such inefficiencies not only stunt economic growth but also lead to smaller government budgets, since lower business revenue yields lower tax payments.

Given the Mexican government’s limited funds, President Felipe Calderón’s administration has chosen to stay the course, continuing to emphasize fiscal austerity, as it did prior to the crisis, rather than implementing a stimulus package. Most other Latin American countries have taken the same approach. Yet practically all countries in the region, aside from Mexico, are navigating the turbulent times with a remarkable level of stability.

Chile’s handling of the crisis serves as a positive model.

Blessed with a thriving copper mining industry, the South American country’s export markets flourished in the years preceding the crisis as copper prices reached an all-time high. Rather than spending all its copper tax revenue right away, however, the Chilean government invested a large portion of these funds in a special account to help the country withstand future downturns. This strategy seems incredibly prescient today, as Chile has been able to put in place a $4 billion stimulus package (2.8 percent of GDP) without going into debt. Chile is providing evidence to counter the long-held assumption that reliance on natural resources leads to profligate spending.

In contrast, Mexico’s investment rating with agencies such as Standard and Poor’s is likely to decline if the country does not resolve its budget imbalance in the coming months. A lower rating would further intensify Mexico’s economic woes by discouraging much-needed foreign investment. Given that Mexico’s oil fields, from which the government derives one-third of its revenue, are in serious decline, the most obvious option for avoiding future budget deficits is to raise the income tax, Katz argued. He suggested a jump from its current level of about 10 percent of GDP to roughly 17 percent. Such a reform poses immense political challenges, however, and >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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prospects for tax reform in the near future are low.

More so than in other Latin American countries, economic downturns in Mexico are exacerbated by emigration. A lack of attractive job opportunities induces young Mexicans — both skilled and unskilled — to cast their fate as immigrants in the U.S., leading to a shortage of qualified workers for new jobs in Mexico, as well as subpar tax receipts and consumption. Katz maintained that formal Mexican employment would have to grow to offer potential migrants better alternatives than moving across the border, but the trend is in the opposite direction: only the informal sector is growing in Mexico today, and informal employment tends to be precarious and poorly remunerated.

Boosting formal employment opportunities, however, would require highly contentious reforms to policy on energy, education, telecommunications and labor law.

Unfortunately, Mexico’s political parties have demonstrated a stubborn reluctance to reach compromises on these types of reforms, leading to stalemate in Congress. Katz concluded his remarks by noting that Mexico’s demographic window of opportunity, the period when the country’s working-age population is at its peak, is set to close in 2020. If Mexico does not enact reforms before then, he warned, the country will remain permanently poor.

Poverty indicators lend credence to this sobering assertion. According to figures calculated by Coneval, the Mexican government’s Council to Evaluate Social Development Policy, the number of Mexicans living below the poverty line has increased by roughly 6 million, from 44.7 to 50.6 million since 2006. This despite the country’s concerted effort to decrease the incidence of poverty, which BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Mexico’s demographic window of opportunity.

(Source: “De la población de México 2005-2050,” Consejo Nacional de Población/www.conapo.gob.mx.)

climbed to a high of 64 million in the aftermath of the 1996 peso crisis. The latest increase in the poverty level reflects the fact that many Mexican citizens who had been precariously perched above the poverty line before the crisis today struggle to make ends meet. According to data from the Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo (ENOE, National Survey on Occupation and Employment), formal unemployment has only increased from 3.5 percent to 5.2 percent since the second quarter of 2008, but underemployment — defined as involuntary part-time employment — has almost doubled during the same period, rising from 6.9 percent to 11.1 percent of workers.

In light of their pessimism regarding traditional manufacturing and oil, participants at the forum suggested other economic sectors — such as green energy and health tourism — that could lead the way to a bilateral economic recovery. Special attention was paid to potential economic reforms that could generate bilateral synergy, casting Mexico and the United States as partners in new ventures rather than as competitors.

David Bonior, a former Democratic Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives (Mich., 1991-2002) and current president of American

Rights at Work, a nonprofit labor rights organization, offered two proposals for reforms that could lead to greater long-term economic health for the United States. The first was investment in “green energy” technology, such as solar power, which, according to Bonior, has the potential to strengthen the U.S. manufacturing sector in the immediate term and also to insure the country against rising fossil fuel prices.

Bonior’s second proposal was the passage of legislation, such as the Employee Free Choice Act, that would strengthen the bargaining power of U.S. unions, ameliorating rising inequality and the ongoing crisis of insufficient demand from middle-class consumers. While Reich, a former U.S. Labor Secretary (1993-97), concurred that improving the bargaining power of the U.S. working class would be a step in the right direction, he warned that American manufacturing jobs are facing several threats, including the automation of industrial production and the outsourcing of jobs.

Harley Shaiken, Chair of UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies, agreed that potential advances in low-carbon energy technology offer an opportunity for the U.S. and Mexican economies to turn the corner.

Shaiken further emphasized that these

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

countries can learn a lesson from China about the close relationship between manufacturing and development.

Rather than designing high-tech products domestically and outsourcing the manufacturing, Shaiken argued that the U.S. should retain domestic manufacturing jobs, as China has done, by sustaining a close linkage between the research and production processes of such energy-efficient technology as hybrid cars, solar-power components and advanced battery systems.

Despite the dire economic prospects faced by the U.S. and Mexico, the two countries’ shared suffering has the potential to yield a positive outcome. With both countries facing a need for far-reaching economic reform, new opportunities may arise for closer bilateral collaboration.

Rafael Fernández de Castro, Presidential Adviser on International Affairs and Competitiveness in Mexico, shared his vision of “Nafta 2.0,” a set of reforms that would usher in a period of greater economic cooperation.

Potential components of Nafta 2.0 include: allowing U.S. retirees to use Medicare in Mexico, thereby contributing to the Mexican economy and accessing less-costly treatment than that provided by U.S. doctors; creating a North American market for the copper trade; improving border infrastructure, particularly by installing the necessary

facilities to safely allow the passage of Mexican trucks into the U.S.; and implementing bilateral agreements on labor policy. Such proposals are likely to be met with great resistance; in particular, healthcare policy and border security are highly contentious political issues in the United States.

Whether such reforms take place depends on political will and the outcome of future bilateral negotiations.

What the speakers at this panel made clear, however, is that the economic fates of the United States and Mexico are intimately linked. Without much-needed reforms, both economies are likely to continue to stumble for the foreseeable future.

The Economic Crisis Panel was one of four sessions of the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum held at UC Berkeley on August 23-25, 2009. The presenters included J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley; Isaac Katz, Professor of Economics at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México; and Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and former U.S. Secretary of Labor (1993-97).

Brian Palmer-Rubin is a Ph.D. student in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

Photo by Steve Liss/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

American retirees go to Mexico for low-cost health care and affordable retirement options.

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Federal police line Mexico City’s Zócalo before a speech by President Calderón.

(Photo by Julie Akers.)

Peering Behind the Curtain

by Jude Joffe-Block and Brian Palmer-Rubin

C

an a political system be described as democratic if its own citizens are unable to access official documents or even basic information about government processes? Analysts argue that “access to information” or “transparency” reforms are a key element of the second step of democratization, the ongoing political transformations that secure the rule of law and open up opportunities for greater political participation in fledgling democracies. In the last decade, these types of reforms have been adopted by several Latin American governments, transforming the relationship between agencies and the citizens they serve.

Transparency reforms are not only important in young democracies, however. As demonstrated by the notoriously opaque Bush administration — particularly with regard to national security — basic political freedoms and the BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

quality of democracy are vulnerable to abuse if politicians are not subject to public scrutiny.

The United States and Mexico are both at pivotal moments in achieving greater government transparency.

In 2002, the Mexican Congress passed a federal transparency law and created an agency to handle information requests from citizens, the Instituto Federal de Acceso a la Información Pública (Federal Agency for Public Information Access, IFAI). And in the U.S., as one of his first acts in office, President Barack Obama wrote a memo to the heads of federal agencies and departments, calling on them to help usher in what he called “a new era of open government.”

While these advances are welcome steps in the right direction, both countries still have work to do

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to ensure greater openness and accountability in their political systems, according to Kristin Adair, Staff Counsel at the National Security Archive, a research institute based in Washington, D.C., and Juan Ernesto Pardinas, a consultant with the Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad (Mexican Institute for Competitiveness). Adair and Pardinas delivered presentations on these topics at the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum panel on Transparency and Accountability.

The U.S. pioneered access to information legislation with the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which was one of the first laws ratified worldwide to allow citizens to request access to state documents. Yet in the four decades since this law was adopted, the U.S. government has experienced ebbs and flows in its level of transparency. The latest transition of power is only the most recent example. Adair explained that transparency policy in the U.S. remains at a crossroads between the Bush administration, which operated under the “presumption of secrecy,” and the Obama administration, which has pledged to disclose any information that does not clearly fall under the category of classified.

Still, even with the Obama administration’s renewed commitment to transparency, the American system is grappling with a number of challenges, according to Adair. National security concerns still loom large and are often in conf lict with the public’s “right-to-know.”

For example, the Obama administration cited security concerns when it refused to release photographs of tortured detainees in U.S. custody.

Furthermore, the procedure for responding to information requests is not yet seamless. Federal agencies do not have adequate resources to respond effectively to citizen information requests, sometimes leading to long delays in answering these petitions, which renders the service unsuitable for media organizations operating on short deadlines or lawyers who need information for pending legal proceedings. In addition to these logistical concerns is the technical challenge of archiving government records and communications when so much government business is now done over email.

Moreover, the system lacks any built-in oversight or enforcement mechanisms; complaints for unjust denials of information requests must go though the courts for resolution — a lengthy and arduous path. There is reason for optimism, however. Adair noted that in the fall of 2009, the Office of Government Services will be introduced, employing an ombudsman who will take up the cause of citizens in cases where agencies did not comply with their information requests.

One hope for the Obama administration’s new policy of openness is that it will translate into freer information sharing between U.S. and Mexican authorities. Adair argued that security interests would benefit if law enforcement agencies on both sides of the border were to have a more streamlined process for coordination.

Also, improving bilateral communication regarding environmental health issues is necessary to avoid public health disasters in border areas, pointed out Adrián Fernández Bremauntz, president of the Instituto Nacional de Ecologia (INE, National Ecological Institute), a research organization of the Mexican government.

Not only are there likely benefits to information sharing across the border, Adair also highlighted several ways in which the U.S. could improve access to information by following the example of Mexico’s IFAI. First, the IFAI handles information requests through a streamlined and user-friendly, Internet-based system in contrast to the U.S. system, where requests must be submitted to individual agencies. Second, the IFAI consistently sets and monitors deadlines for government agencies to respond to citizen requests. While Mexican agencies have up to 30 days to respond, Adair cited cases of U.S. agencies taking as long as 20 years.

Indeed, Mexico’s approach to government transparency is both innovative and far reaching. The IFAI, which serves the role of intermediary between citizens and government agencies, is a unique institution.

In most other countries with access to information laws — like the U.S. — citizens submit their requests directly to the agencies from which they require the information.

The procedure and the success rate often vary widely between agencies. In contrast, the IFAI centralizes the process, allowing citizens to submit all of their requests for information from federal government agencies through a single, user-friendly website. With the click of a mouse, a citizen can also register an appeal if she feels that an information request was unduly denied or an agency’s response was inadequate. A board of IFAI commissioners then considers the appeal, with the mandate to insist on disclosure in cases where the information requested is not explicitly exempt according to the 2002 transparency law.

This system has yielded positive results: a recent analysis found that over 80 percent of information requests handled by the IFAI were fulfilled within the established deadline.

The IFAI is not without its faults, however. Requesting government information remains a difficult proposition for the average citizen. Information requests that are not composed using bureaucratic jargon or referencing official documents are often unsuccessful. Agencies can deny >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Peering Behind the Curtain

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Image courtesy of the state of Baja California Sur.

requests by claiming that the information sought does not exist. These denials are close to impossible for the citizen requester or the IFAI to verify.

Mexican statesman Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas noted that one of the IFAI’s greatest weaknesses is its inability to compel compliance in cases where agencies refuse to provide information that the appeals board has already directed them to release. Mexico’s Secretaría de la Función Pública (Ministry of Public Administration), a federal agency charged with promoting governmental transparency and accountability, is vested with the power to enforce compliance with the rulings of the IFAI appeals board. As Cárdenas pointed out, however, this enforcement body often appears to be more interested in catching people in the act of malfeasance than actually preventing abuses, missing many opportunities to improve the provision of information. Pardinas agreed with Cárdenas’ observation but was cautiously optimistic that a newer agency, the Auditoría Superior de la Federación, which is modeled on the U.S. Government Accountability Office, has the potential to improve the oversight system for Mexico’s transparency mechanism.

Several of the shortcomings of Mexico’s access to information system are described in an article by Jonathan Fox, Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz, entitled “Mexico’s Right-to-Know Reforms,” published in the Fall 2008 edition of this journal. Fox recounts the experiences of grassroots civil society organizations in the Mexican state of Guerrero that attempted to use the public information system to uncover official documents revealing misappropriation of federal funds for state-run rural health clinics. Even though activists from these organizations had personally seen the documents requested, they were told by the Department of Health that the documents did not exist. Their appeals were unsuccessful because the IFAI appeals board was unable to verify whether or not the documents existed.

This example demonstrates another weakness in Mexican government transparency. State and local governments are not subject to the federal access to information law or to the jurisdiction of the IFAI, leading to generally lower levels of transparency for these entities.

Pardinas’ presentation highlighted the serious inadequacies in government oversight at the state and municipal levels in Mexico. He argued that Mexico’s decentralization of executive agencies in the 1990s was too hasty and failed to create adequate provisions for ensuring responsible governance at the local level. In particular, he cited a lack of standard budgeting practices at the state and local levels. As a case in point, Pardinas

The terse budget for the state of Baja California Sur.

compared the state of Jalisco’s detailed 2008 budget, which totaled 277 pages, with the single paragraph produced by Baja California Sur. Many analysts support Pardinas’ assertion that the shortcomings of Mexico’s federal political system are the result of the haphazard way in which decentralization reforms were adopted. Decentralization began to pick up steam in the 1990s, when the Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto Zedillo administrations expanded state and municipal budgets as much as tenfold and allowed state governments to drastically increase taxation of their citizens. By 1997, state and municipal governments had acquired much greater control over such policy areas as education, health care, public works and economic development. These reforms took place during a period in which the once-hegemonic Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) began to face serious threats to its electoral dominance at the national level. The party was able to strengthen its electoral base at a more local level by decentralizing budgets and policymaking to governors and municipal presidents. However, these reforms were undertaken without the necessary preconditions: capacity building for state and municipal governments; legislation to guide budgeting and public administration; and mechanisms for coordination between federal, state and local leaders.

To illustrate his point that decentralization had led to inadequate government oversight, Pardinas shared the colorful case of José Antonio Ríos Granados, the former

mayor of Tultitlán, a small city in the state of Mexico, who took advantage of lax oversight to alter the municipal budget and to elevate his own salary to roughly $250,000 — a figure that compares favorably with the salaries of many G-8 leaders. The enterprising mayor also used government funds to attract the B-movie industry to Tultitlán, with the condition that he appear in films shot in his city.

Pardinas theorized that a lack of oversight led many other local and state governments to squander their budget surpluses during times of prosperity, an outcome that is exacting a painful cost for Mexico in today’s dire economic climate.

Still, a great triumph of Mexico’s access to information law is that citizen watchdog efforts can expose these instances of government mismanagement. Uncovering corruption with facts obtained through IFAI information requests can also be a source of empowerment for groups that are traditionally marginalized.

C.R. Hibbs, Managing Director of the Hewlett Foundation’s Mexico Program, recounted one such case to the group of participants in the session. She told of a woman’s organization in rural Veracruz that used an information request to access health records that proved that the government had falsified documents in order to deny them essential medical procedures to which they were entitled. By exposing this misconduct, these women were able to draw attention to their cause and pressure the state to provide the promised medical services. In light of cases such as these, Hibbs urged the forum participants not to lose sight of “the power of the information itself to change lives and have an impact on even the poorest of the poor and the least-empowered citizens.”

As Harley Shaiken, Chair of the UC Berkeley Center for Latin

DVD cover from Woodhaven Entertainment.

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This B-movie, shot in Tultitlán, features the town’s then-mayor, José Antonio Ríos Granados.

American Studies observed, the discussion went beyond transparency and accountability and was, in fact, about the infrastructure necessary for a democratic society. “Absent transparency, development becomes far more complicated. Absent transparency and accountability, democratic processes are much more uncertain,” Shaiken concluded.

The Transparency and Accountability Panel was a session of the U.S.– Mexico Futures Forum held at UC Berkeley on August 23-25, 2009.

Presenters included Kristin Adair, Staff Counsel at the National Security Archive, and Juan Ernesto Pardinas, Consultant for the Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad.

Jude Joffe-Block is a student in the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Brian Palmer-Rubin is a Ph.D. student in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

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Headwinds for Climate Change Policy

U.S.– MEXICO FUTURES FORUM

Headwinds for Climate Change Policy

by Christopher M. Jones

“T

he climate imperative is truly pressing… every single lesson on the climate science side is bad.” Dan Kammen, a UC Berkeley professor of Energy and Public Policy, pulled no punches in his opening remarks as part of the Alternative Energy Panel at the 2009 U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum. Oceans, terrestrial ecosystems and the Arctic are experiencing rates of change that scientists had not previously predicted in any of the global climate models, he asserted. Kammen’s fellow panelist, Bracken Hendricks of the Center for American Progress, elaborated on his grim prognosis, pointing to the human and economic costs of such rapid environmental change: “Two to four billion people going without access to reliable drinking water is not an environmental problem. It’s a tremendous geopolitical security problem. It’s a health problem. It’s a devastating social and economic problem.”

The panel, which also included Adrián Fernández Bremauntz, President of Mexico’s National Ecology Institute, continued a discussion begun at the 2008 Futures Forum held in Mexico City. At that conference, Kammen documented the continuing rise in global carbon emissions despite the growing availability of cost-effective, low-carbon technologies. Worse still, he warned, when oil prices rise, vast reserves of even more environmentally damaging oil from tar sands and other unconventional sources will enter the global fuel mix unless policies explicitly require that the energy gap be filled with clean, renewable sources such as wind, solar and tidal energy. “It’s going to be a policy battle, first and foremost,” he said then. “And that’s a sobering thought because, in this area, policy in the United States moves slowly.”

Less than a year later, the tone of the conversation had shifted dramatically. This time, Kammen focused his comments on the “remarkable” changes in the political landscape and on a range of new opportunities arising to support a cleaner energy economy. The most notable change in the political landscape was, of course, the election of BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Photo courtesy of the Mexican Federal Government.

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President Calderón speaks at the opening of La Ventosa, a wind farm in Oaxaca.

President Barack Obama. With a sizable portion of economic stimulus money being directed to clean energy and a climate change bill making its way through Congress, addressing climate change has moved up the political agenda.

Now, the greatest challenge is keeping up with the tremendous opportunities afforded by the stimulus funding, Kammen explained. “We are dramatically understaffed… the number of people who are expert and working on the diverse aspects of the low-carbon economy is dramatically smaller than the most minimum set you would want in these areas.” With roughly one-eighth of stimulus funding being channeled into clean energy, “all federal energy offices, in the very short term, now have an infinite amount of money, in the sense that there is well more money available than they can spend.”

The implication is that so-called shovel-ready clean energy projects can now be dramatically scaled-up.

Kammen cited one example, a clever financing scheme first proposed in the city of Berkeley, which is designed to take the sting out of upfront costs for homeowners. Under the plan, cities borrow money at low rates, pay for energy retrofits and

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solar installations on the homes of participating residents and then simply charge homeowners the loan amount over time by marginally increasing their property taxes, the amount of which is offset by lower monthly energy bills. In part due to such financing options, Kammen argued that solar could contribute upwards of 20 percent of U.S. electricity by 2025 or sooner. Coupled with a similar or greater amount of energy from wind, these two renewable energy sources alone could cut greenhouse gas emissions from electricity in half. Portugal already gets 42 percent of its electricity from wind during peak times, Kammen noted.

Building on this example, Bracken Hendricks pointed out that the benefits of the Berkeley model extend far beyond greenhouse gas reductions. With creative energy financing, “you’re getting consumer savings. You’re getting job creation. You’re deploying clean energy technology. You’re reducing carbon emissions, and you’re creating all these spillover economic development benefits.” In other words, “solving global warming is really an investment agenda” that can ultimately drive

economic development in a virtuous cycle of positive feedback loops.

Reiterating a point by Kammen, Hendricks maintained that the transition to a clean energy economy is not just about creating green jobs; it’s about creating jobs, plain and simple. It’s about creating more vibrant and sustainable economies. “Fundamentally we’re asking the wrong question if we ask how much does it cost to build a lowcarbon economy.” The important question is not whether we should invest in a clean energy future, but what, exactly, are we going to build. “How do we rewire the grid around renewable energy? How do we go block-by-block and household-by-household and retrofit for energy efficiency?” he asked.

If the debate in the United States is shifting to substance, the focus in Mexico is shifting to international diplomacy. Mexico has become the first developing country to voluntarily commit to greenhouse gas reduction, and it is now an active player in international climate change mitigation talks through the Kyoto Protocol process. A recent proposal by the Calderón administration would create a “green fund” for global development that would allow any country, regardless of its level of economic development, to borrow from and invest in the fund. As Hendricks noted, this changes the way we think about the issues in fundamental ways. Instead of framing the international climate debate in terms of the interests of rich vs. poor countries, the concept of a green fund creates a framework for international cooperation.

For panelist Adrián Fernández Bremauntz, Calderón’s proposals don’t go far enough. Mexico should accept a mandatory or binding greenhouse gas reduction commitment. “The time for sitting on the fence is over,” he said. What is needed is a comprehensive climate strategy that creates an “optimal package” of interventions that is appropriate for Mexico’s political, economic and social context. Unfortunately, the time for Mexico to create its own strategy is quickly running out. “We are moving at a very slow pace. The time will come that we will have to sign a policy that was designed by someone else,” he warned.

Not surprisingly, a major challenge to designing effective climate policy in Mexico and other developing countries is a vast shortage of technical expertise. Echoing Kammen’s previous point about human capital, Fernández added, “If the United States is understaffed, think about Mexico. We have scarce human capital in Mexico. That’s Mexico. What about Central America?” In spite of these difficulties, Mexico and other developing countries should work quickly to create a set of climate policies and interventions that are within reach. This is critical if >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Projected green collar jobs created and power generated by state under renewable portfolio standard (RPS) regulations, which set requirements for the proportion of energy produced from renewable sources.

(Source: UC Berkeley Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory/rael.berkeley.edu.)

appropriate reduction targets are to be set for individual countries.

For Mexico, Fernández proposed that target setting should be based on: 1) actions that can be taken at the country’s own initiative; 2) actions that can be financed through subsidized international loans; and 3) actions that are possible if the upfront costs of moving to clean technology are paid for by countries with historic responsibility for global warming.

If all these reductions are added up, Mexico could make a serious commitment to reducing carbon emissions. He estimated that “a 30 to 40 percent deviation from businesses as usual” was possible if there was an international commitment to helping Mexico reduce emissions.

The question-and-answer session highlighted the gap between the political will to take a leadership position in climate change negotiations that exists at high levels of Mexico’s government and the lack of widespread popular concern about the issue. Rafael Fernández de Castro, Presidential BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Advisor on International Affairs and Competitiveness, noted, “I don’t see that President Calderón is gaining anything politically for being responsible, environmentally speaking.” With security and development at the top of the Mexican agenda, addressing climate change is simply not an attractive political platform.

Isaac Katz, a professor of Economics at ITAM, pointed to additional institutional barriers.

“Building a wind farm in Mexico is quite impossible,” he maintained.

The most attractive sites are on ejidos (communal lands) and, therefore, approval has to go through the Ministry of Land Reform. Mexico’s petroleum monopoly, Pemex, presents another important obstacle.

As a strategy intended to fight poverty, Pemex keeps energy prices artificially low, thereby undercutting incentives to conserve. Furthermore, as Fernández noted, the county’s energy strategy mandates that electricity be produced by the cheapest possible means, which leads to the use of

highly polluting domestic fuel oil.

In short, changing institutions takes time, and time is of the essence if the most damaging effects of climate change are to be averted.

Several participants lamented the amount of time already wasted.

UC Berkeley economist J. Bradford Delong noted that 16 years had elapsed since President Clinton dropped the “Btu tax” — a proposal to tax the heat content of fuels — in 1993. In his view, decades of delay have placed a future with a 2°C rise in temperature out of reach. Barring some miracle, “we face a 5°C global warming future over the next 70 to 150 years,” he warned. Both Hendricks and Kammen were surprisingly upbeat in the face of these comments.

“While I accept the premise that it’s tragic that we lost that time, it’s also irrelevant,” Hendricks contended.

“Because if we do nothing, we end up with that future. That future is unacceptable. How are we going to get busy, tomorrow, to build this?” he challenged. Kammen concurred, adding, “it’s remarkable… how quickly these technologies have changed when there actually was a focus on them.”

The need to bring the developing world on board was also a common area of concern, and a prescient one, as developments at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen attest. At the Forum, Kammen argued that despite the fact that “it’s a logical negotiating position for China and India and many other countries to say, ‘Global warming was created largely by the North, therefore it’s your problem,’” China, at least, has made significant investments in clean technology.

In spite of the differences between the developed and the developing world, Fernández maintained that “there’s agreement on what needs to be done.” The problem lies in how the burden is

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going to be shared. Katz built on this idea, arguing that a significant stumbling block will be how to compensate the losers. “The senators from the Midwest are really opposing any energy bill that will cause a reduction in GDP production,” he noted. “If we take that to the world as a whole, developing countries are less willing to reduce carbon emissions because they are poor. The relative cost for them is higher than for the U.S.” There needs to be a mechanism to compensate those who will experience a drop in production if they are asked to reduce emissions, he asserted.

To wrap up, the panelists were asked to summarize the single, most important point they wanted the participants to take away from the session. Professor Kammen’s answer was succinct. “The one most important idea is pricing carbon.

Period. No footnotes, no nothing. If we don’t price carbon, even to some degree, we will never send a consistent signal to business, and we won’t reward companies that find a way to innovate and go to that lower carbon future... Putting a price on carbon that is too low is better than no price on carbon.” Until we do that, he concluded, “everything else we’re doing is a holding pattern, cobbling things together.”

In the months since the Futures Forum, the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference has come and

gone to surprisingly small effect, and the cap-and-trade bill has stalled in Congress. While the cobbling together continues at the sub-state level, global policy remains in a holding pattern, with developed and developing countries facing off in a high-stakes game of chicken. It remains to be seen whether the dynamism of new policies and new technologies will be enough to stabilize the climate in the absence of a binding international treaty.

The Alternative Energy Panel was a session of the U.S.– Mexico Futures Forum held at UC Berkeley on August 2325, 2009. The presenters included Daniel M. Kammen, 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy at UC Berkeley; Bracken Hendricks, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Adrián Fernández Bremauntz, President of Mexico’s National Ecology Institute.

Christopher M. Jones is Staff Research Associate at the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.

Futures Forum coverage continues on page 31>>

Photo courtesy of the White House.

President Barack Obama speaks with world leaders at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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The Making of a Maestro

Photo by Peg Skorpinski.

ART

Fernando Botero in conversation with Lawrence Rinder, September 2009.

The Making of a Maestro Lawrence Rinder Interviews Fernando Botero On September 23, 2009, the Center for Latin American Studies and the Berkeley Art Museum held a public event to celebrate Fernando Botero’s donation of his Abu Ghraib series of paintings and drawings to the University of California, Berkeley. At the event, the internationally acclaimed artist was presented with the Chancellor’s Citation for his lifetime of achievement. He then engaged in a public discussion about his life and work with the museum’s director, Lawrence Rinder.

Rinder: Your first presentation as an artist was in 1948, when I believe you were only 16 years old. You sold an illustration, if I am not mistaken.

Botero: Well, yes. I started to participate in group shows in my hometown with the older painters of the region. Then I moved to Bogotá and stopped my high school studies and became a professional artist very early. I was 17 or 18 when I started as a professional.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

R: This work from 1949, “Crying Woman,” was done only a year after you first began to show publicly. Historically, 1948 was the first year of what has become known as “La violencia” — which was a tragic and tremendously important moment in the history of Colombia. We’re still seeing the after-effects today. And it’s unfortunate that your own career began at the very moment when Colombia began to unravel. I wonder if you could talk about “La violencia,” what it was and how it impacted your early years as an artist.

B: It had a great impact because, of course, young people are very sensitive to these manifestations of violence, social injustice, etc. We were very touched by this situation. As you said, violence started in Colombia with the killing of Jorge Gaitán, who was a popular leader who was going to be president. A very reactionary group in Colombia killed him, and then the reaction of the masses was total.

They burned half of Bogotá and Medellín. Every young

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intellectual, student, artist, etc. was very touched by the situation.

From the point of view of painting, of course, at that time we had very little information about international art. What we got mostly were reports of Mexican art. I was very interested in Diego Rivera and especially Orozco, as you see in “Crying Woman.” At the same time, there is an interesting element in this watercolor from 1949: there was already a special interest in volume that you can see in the arm of the “Crying Woman.” My watercolors of that time were always very volumetric, and I just cannot explain why. Really it was unusual. When I was a student in Florence a couple of years later, I was able to rationalize the importance of volume and understand that in these watercolors there was already a tendency inside me. That’s why I was so enthusiastic about Quattrocento art [the art of 15th century Italy].

R: You went to Europe in 1952. I imagine part of the reason was to see the great works of art but also to get out of the declining political and social situation in Colombia.

B: It was mostly because I wanted to see the Great Masters, the museums, etc. I didn’t know much about the Great Masters because there was so little information. I knew there was somebody called Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Velázquez, but there was very little information. So when I got to Europe, I discovered their fantastic work and that art was much more important than I had ever thought, more complex and extraordinary.

My original plan was to go to Paris, as every young artist aspires to do. Then I changed my plans and went to Italy. That is why my work is very involved with Italian art,

“Crying Woman,” watercolor on paper, 59 x 44 cm, 1949. (© Fernando Botero, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.)

especially the Quattrocento: Uccello, Piero della Francesca, etc. As a matter of fact, I realized when I went to Florence that Mexican art was actually inspired by and derivative of the Quattrocento. It was better to see the source of this art. From then on, I was not looking at Mexican art; I was looking at Quattrocento.

R: And then in ’56 you actually did go to Mexico City. Did you meet any of the muralists at that time?

B: I met Diego Rivera once but in a group of about ten people. He was there; I was there.

R: And the influence had already occurred in your youth.

B: Well, no. I was very inf luenced by Mexican art in the beginning because that was the only thing you saw. Then once I went to Europe, I saw the difference — I saw the Great Masters that inspired the Mexican work. Then I was much less impressed. >>

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The Making of a Maestro

© Fernando Botero, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.

“Still Life With Mandolin,” oil on canvas, 67 x 121 cm, 1957.

I think the Mexican artists were very important because they reflected the political problems of their time.

The reality of the country was revolutionary, and beyond style or technique, they were confronting the very human problems in Mexico.

R: I want to go back to the point you made about volume. You said earlier that volume was an issue even at the very beginning in the 1949 watercolor. I wonder if you could talk about this picture, “Still Life With Mandolin.” I think it was a bit of an epiphany for you.

B: A very early work, yes. By then I saw the importance of volume in paintings. I was reading a lot of Bernard Berenson who gave tremendous importance to volume.

As a matter of fact, he created a scale of importance based on the ability to produce what he called “tactile values.” As I said before, in my early work there was an element of volume.

Then, all my work became more and more involved with volume but in a way that was very derivative of the Italian volume.

One day, I was painting a mandolin, and the moment I was going to make the hole in the instrument, I did it very small. There

was something there that I identified with immediately. I saw that it became much more important, much more radical. The contrast between the small detail and the generous outline makes the form become much more important and aggressive and sensual and so many things. People recognize my work very easily because they see this exaltation, this extravagant or exaggerated volume.

Volume was very important through the centuries after the time of Giotto up to the Impressionists.

Volume was expressed more or less in every painting. After the Impressionists, and in the 20th century, art became much more dimensionally flat, and volume was forgotten. For me, part of the magic of a painting is the fact that on this flat surface you have the illusion of space and volume. It really is part of the mystery of painting. Without volume, an element of mystery and sensuality is missing. That is why I am critical of much of this art that was extremely decorative. I wanted my work to reincorporate this element that was somehow forgotten or dismissed in the 20th century.

R: So you began applying volume to figures in quite a pronounced way, as in this piece called “Dead Bishops”

from 1958, a really remarkable work that actually anticipates one of the works upstairs, in the Abu Ghraib collection.

B: Yes, exactly. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of this painting.

R: In the 1958 painting you can see that we are talking about the rotund outline with the small detail. It’s clear.

There is another element to this painting, a quality to the palette and also to the brush stroke, which really only existed in your work for about three or four years, right at this point from 1958 to ’61 or ’62. The palette is almost fauve: bright colors, more expressionistic in a way. I think this was a period when you were also living in New York, and I wonder whether there was an influence at all from the Abstract Expressionists, or what was the context of this work?

B: I saw the Abstract Expressionist paintings and was very seduced by them. It was a very seductive movement because of the freedom, the generosity, the sensuality of the application of color, the brush stroke.

I started painting with a brush stroke that was apparent.

The art of the Quattrocento always has a very fine surface, and, historically, most art has very smooth surfaces. There were very few artists — like Frans Hals, like Goya in his Black Paintings — who left the brush stroke very evident. But the Abstract Expressionist paintings were so interesting that for some years I was doing this. But then, in a way, I found that it was a contradiction.

I was trying to bring some calm to my work. I admire the calm of Piero della Francesca very much. I admire the calm in Egyptian and Greek art.

Calm gives a sense of eternity to the form; this exaltation, this fever of the continued on page 28 >>

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Right: “Dead Bishops,” oil on canvas, 190 x 218 cm, 1958.

Left: “Dead Bishops,” oil on canvas, 175 x 190 cm, 1965.

Following Page: “Abu Ghraib 89,” 171 x 111 cm, oil on canvas, 2006.

(All images © Fernando Botero, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.)

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Spring 2009

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The Making of a Maestro

brush stroke, was a contradiction. That is why, at a certain moment, I stopped.

R: So, for example, this version from 1965 — it’s the same painting but done in the style of Piero della Francesca. So why a pile of dead bishops?

B: I really don’t know my reason exactly. But the reason I painted people from the church is because, in the Renaissance, people went around with the most fantastic colors. They painted that way because the models were then full of color. In our time, most people wear grey or black or white, and the people of the church and the toreros are the only ones who use extravagant colors. For me, it was a pretext to use color.

R: It’s like a still life of fruit, but instead it’s dead bishops.

B: Why were they in a pile? I really don’t know. I cannot explain that.

R. And what about these folks? This is called “Official Portrait of the Military Junta” from 1971. I think that this clearly is not just about a grouping of color. This is really a social, a political satire. The composition here very closely resembles the Goya painting “The Family of Charles IV.” So tell me about this. Is this a particular family? What was going on socially and politically at this time?

B: Well, this was the time of the Somozas, the Trujillos and so many military juntas in Latin America. And of course everybody who was intelligent was against this ridiculous thing. It was very easy to make satires when you heard the stories of generals who were five years old and the kinds of things that they did in the Dominican Republic and Guatemala and places like that. Most of Latin America suffered this kind of military dictatorship. And I did a series of paintings that were satires of these people. Of course, Goya’s “The Family of Charles IV” was a good example. I did a presentation of the Latin American family that was like “The Family of Charles IV.” R: And so, in this case, the volumizing of the figures seems to be clearly a satirical element. Would you say that, in this case, that formal quality plays the role of satire?

B: Well, the thing is that this volume, for some reason, inspired people to think that it was funny. When you see somebody who is very slim, you don’t think it’s funny. But you think that somebody who is fat is funny.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Actually, I was not trying to do satire. I was trying to satirize the costumes and the fact that there were these little generals. I did a presentation that was satirical, but it was done with the same spirit that I do still life. All my life, I have been painting still life because the act of painting is caressing, is trying to communicate sensuality and peace through the form. Even if I do a painting on a subject that is repulsive, in a way I have to treat it with the same love that I treat a fruit. That is the contradiction, but that’s the way it is.

R: What was the response to this work in Latin America?

Did you have any difficulty among the ruling classes? They must have sensed that all was not well, or did they not even notice? Did they commission pieces like this?

B: Actually, I did not meet any of these dictators. I was living in Europe and New York. But the painting became extremely popular. People were reproducing it in many places. That was the positive thing. Actually, that was what I wanted, that the satire be planted in the mind of the people so they would see how ridiculous these dictators were.

R: So the Abu Ghraib series is not at all new in your work, in that it takes on the subject of state violence. This is actually something that you have been representing for decades. This untitled piece here from 1978 is one example, but one of many. You’ve been speaking about the role of art to create a feeling of calm and that every painting is finally a still life, but can you speak for a moment about the relationship between, maybe not art, but an artist’s practice and state violence? How do you think art should respond? How have you responded?

B: You cannot be indifferent to situations that are so repulsive. At that time, the police were treating people very badly. There were these two paintings that ref lected the situation. Later on, I ref lected the violence in my country, in Colombia. I did a series of paintings that were very dramatic…

R: …of the drug war…

B: …of the massacres, the parades of coffins. You would see these parades of 50 or 60 coffins coming down the main streets of these towns. I saw this on television, and I did paintings. As a matter of fact, I donated that series to the National Museum in Colombia.

Every time that I’m impressed or shocked by something, it comes out in my work. I was shocked by the torture in Iraq at the time of the Bush administration. It

© Fernando Botero, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

“The Official Portrait of the Military Junta,” oil on canvas, 173 x 218 cm, 1971.

was something the whole world was against. Everybody that was involved with art, because of the sensibility of the artist, was more shocked. That is why I developed like a rage. And one day I started to visualize what was going on in that prison, and then I began painting. I kept working and working. It became an obsession until I said what I had to say. And somehow it was like a therapy, because the more I painted, the more calm there was in my heart.

When I finished doing the series, I felt peace, somehow. It was a therapy really. But I knew that I had to do something because it was such a shocking thing. And I did.

R: I wanted to ask you about Christianity because this is a theme that was discussed quite a bit in the conversations that took place on the occasion of your last visit. Professor Tom Laqueur called the Passion of Christ, “the paradigmatic instance of suffering in the Western tradition,” and he suggested that this theme was a very strong undercurrent in your work.

As a sort of counterpoint to that, T.J. Clark, who is also on the faculty here, said that your work might have been stronger if it had stayed, “true to the sordid meaninglessness of the moments captured on film.” He wished that you had explored Abu Ghraib’s fundamental distance from the narratives that have defined Western artistic culture, such as the association of physical suffering with redemption and the sacred.

So two different points of view: one seeing the connection to Christianity as empowering the work and giving its message added volume, if you will, and another saying that the allusion to the narrative of Christianity and the connection between suffering and sacredness is not really true to what happened, that there was little sacred in Abu Ghraib. Can you talk about that?

B: People have often found a connection between religious art, Christianity, the Passion of Christ and the work I do.

The truth is that in Latin America, religious art shows a very >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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bloody presentation of Christ. It was the kind of the thing you saw in every church. Where there are no museums, no traditions, no galleries, the art you see when you are a child and an adolescent is at church.

At the same time, in Latin America the subject of art has traditionally been religious. Ninety percent of the work was religious. Then, in the 20th century, there was an absence of religion in paintings, in art. In a way, it was like what happened with volume; volume was an element that disappeared. Religion disappeared as a subject matter in 20th-century art. It had been extremely important for centuries. Then, since there was this tradition in Latin America, I liked to do more of this subject matter, even though I’m not a religious person. But I saw the beauty of these religious paintings by the old masters of Latin America.

And I like the idea of doing something that is forbidden somehow, to give importance to a subject matter that is taboo in modern art. The conception of most art critics is that this subject matter is taboo. I like the idea of doing things that everyone thinks you shouldn’t do. Why not?

There is a great tradition of religious art in art history.

And, for me, art history is extremely important. I am always thinking of the panoramic view of art. If something was important then, why is it not now? Why can’t you do

it now? In a way, art history gives you the authorization to sell certain things. Why — if it was great art — why is it not now?

When I did the Abu Ghraib paintings, all of this background came out. It is normal. But somehow a lot was read into it with the Abu Ghraib series. It’s not that I was trying to do Christ. It is what happened. And it came as an afterthought. It’s not that I did it on purpose.

(Audience question): Why the relative silence from American artists on this particular subject during this time?

B: I think the only logical explanation why the Americans — who I’m sure were personally shocked and disgusted with the situation — didn’t do anything, is because American art is mostly abstract and conceptual. Perhaps some people did do something that made a reference to this torture, but it was not clear. Doing a direct, clear presentation would be a violation of the philosophy of the conceptual artist. There are very few well-known figurative artists in America, and they didn’t do anything. But most art today in America is abstract and conceptual, and it is very difficult to say something like this if you’re an abstract painter. That is the only logical explanation why it was not done. But it is incredible at the same time.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau presents Fernando Botero with the Chancellor’s Citation.

Photo by Peg Skorpinski.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Photo by mañsk.

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

An unofficial street sign in Mexico.

U.S.–MEXICO FUTURES FORUM

Silver or Lead: Confronting the Business of Violence

by Wendy Muse Sinek

M

exico is fast becoming one of the world’s most violent countries. In 2008, the United States military issued a Joint Operating Environment Report that paired Mexico with Pakistan and suggested that both states were “failing” and susceptible to rapid collapse. While many analysts, both in Mexico and elsewhere, strongly dispute this claim, the situation is undeniably grim. According to a 2009 report published by Mexico’s Citizen Council for Public Security and Justice, the murder rate has increased four-fold in Mexico over the past two years, and as of September 2009, Ciudad Juárez was found to be more dangerous than either Medellín or

Baghdad. Today, drug trafficking gangs routinely battle with President Calderón’s federal troops. Mexican citizens find themselves caught in the crossfire, and Americans worry that violence will spill across the border and into their front yards.

What sparked this chain of events? More importantly, what can policy makers in Mexico and the U.S. do to improve security on both sides of the border? Through the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum, UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies convened a roundtable discussion to address these issues. Prominent Mexican and U.S. elected officials met with foreign-policy experts from both >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Silver or Lead

Photo by Guillermo Arias/AP Photo.

Blood and bullet holes mark a Tijuana murder scene.

countries to discuss causes and solutions to this crisis.

Fully aware of the limitations of any given policy response, the participants delved into the contours of the debate to brainstorm realistic policy alternatives.

Shannon O’Neil, Fellow for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, opened the discussion with an analysis of the U.S. response to the Mexican security crisis. On the one hand, Mexico deserves to be at the top of the foreign policy agenda; the two countries have become steadily more intertwined over the past 20 years.

Trade, foreign direct investment and even immigration now flow in both directions. These transnational ties alone are sufficient to warrant increased U.S. attention.

However, the rise of Mexico on the foreign policy agenda is due, sadly, to increased concerns over violence.

Given this heightened interest in Washington, what has the U.S. government done? O’Neil stated that the main policy result has been the Mérida Initiative, a security cooperation and assistance package for Mexico and countries in Central America. According to the U.S. State Department, the program will provide $1.57 billion over three years to address security issues in Mexico, with the money going toward military hardware and training as well as some institution-building initiatives. In BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

addition, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will receive some funding for border investigations and the Treasury Department will step up anti-money laundering efforts.

While the Mérida Initiative will undoubtedly provide needed resources, O’Neil argued that when viewed in comparative perspective, Mexico still appears to be an afterthought. Consider that Colombia, which has generally overcome the security challenges of 2000-01 and is today a relatively stable state, still receives $600 million per year. Pakistan, Mexico’s “partner” as a failing state, is slated to receive $5 billion for 2010 alone.

More importantly, O’Neil stressed that efforts to increase security at the border miss larger social, political and economic concerns that underlie the escalating violence. For example, the priorities of the Mérida Initiative were designed with the Plan Colombia template in mind. However, the security situation in Mexico is very different. The Colombian state struggled to achieve a monopoly over the legitimate use of force throughout their territory because guerrilla movements, led by drug- and weapons-trafficking organizations, had gained control over significant portions of the country. Large swaths of territory were without a strong,

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legitimate state presence, and guerrillas were quick to fill the void. By contrast, the Mexican state is visible and present in every community, and state institutions are found throughout the territory. The issue for Mexico is that these institutions are weak, and in many cases, they have been co-opted by nefarious elements. As a result, critical resources need to be dedicated to institutionbuilding initiatives. Hardware and helicopters are useful for taming guerrilla factions but not for strengthening institutional legitimacy and the rule of law.

For a true security solution, O’Neil emphasized that the U.S. must strengthen democracy in Mexico, namely by supporting the growing Mexican middle class. Americans want the border area to be stable and secure. Pouring funds into military hardware might achieve this objective in the short term, but for sustained peace, the border area and other urban centers must provide economic opportunities for Mexico’s working people. Moreover, no amount of money will be able to solve Mexico’s security dilemma without the support of ordinary citizens.

Amalia García Medina, Governor of Zacatecas, agreed with O’Neil that security is a shared challenge for both countries. However, she argued that Americans

need to acknowledge the many factors that brought Mexico to this crisis point. The U.S. is, after all, the world’s largest consumer market for illegal drugs. By virtue of its geography, Mexico is a natural location for producers and traffickers.

The consequences of geography have been compounded by globalization and the worldwide economic crisis. Since the passage of Nafta, Mexican corn farmers have been hit hard by cheap imports at home and crop subsidies that protect markets abroad. Declining corn prices have made cultivating marijuana a tempting alternative. The recent economic crisis has also increased the pull of the illegal economy. As of September 2009, there were almost 800,000 newly unemployed persons in Mexico, all needing to find a way to make a living.

García Medina stressed that these dynamics give Mexican farming families a terrible choice: suffer the economic vicissitudes of the legal agricultural markets or cultivate economically viable but illegal drug crops.

Complicating this situation is the undeniable fact that corruption exists, not just within Mexico but also at the U.S. border. Within the past few years, Mexican cartels have amassed great power, and 90 percent of their weapons >>

Photo by Juan Carlos Reyes García/AFP/Getty Images.

Soldiers arrest municipal police in Nuevo Léon, November 2009.

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come from the United States. But, García Medina stressed, we must ask ourselves how this occurs. To illustrate her point, she recounted how she had once mistakenly packed a travel sewing kit in her carry-on bag for a flight from the U.S. to Mexico. Her kit, with its small needle, was confiscated as a potential security threat. This incident demonstrates that careful vigilance is clearly possible — and yet there are 11,000 points along the U.S.–Mexico border where weapons of war cross every day. How is it that a tiny sewing needle is caught and confiscated but bazookas and AK-47s pass through undetected? Mexico clearly has a corruption problem, but the U.S. must admit that corruption exists on its side of the border as well. Without it, this level of weapons trafficking would not exist.

García Medina concluded that in order to address Mexico’s security crisis, a highly trained and well-equipped police force is needed. However, she added, Mexicans also need to change their society from within. Every day, young people enter the criminal life. To counter this, families must teach children self-respect, solidarity and responsibility, and everyone should watch out for each other. At the same time, the Mexican government should reinforce these values. To this end, she questioned why Mérida Initiative funds are directed toward weapons and military training but not education, health care or productive community projects. In order to prevent criminal activity, people — especially youth — must be enabled to envision a future with dignity. That is the way out of the security crisis, for both countries, she maintained.

On the whole, O’Neil’s and García Medina’s remarks touched on complementary themes. The U.S. should secure the border while simultaneously heightening efforts to strengthen Mexico’s democratic institutions and support the emerging middle class. For its part, Mexico needs to combat pervasive corruption — but the U.S. should also admit that corruption exists north of the border as well. Reducing the demand for illegal drugs in the U.S. is another component of the solution.

These are broad, long-term goals. Few would argue that they are not worthwhile, but what do they mean in practice? The real work lies in translating desirable ideals like these into feasible policy solutions. The roundtable’s assembled guests took up this challenge and debated the merits and limitations of specific courses of action for over an hour.

Some individuals questioned whether or not Mexican security is at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. Silvano Aureoles Conejo, a senator from Michoacán, affirmed that Mexico is doing its part, but the U.S. needs to share responsibility as well. It’s not enough for Mexican violence BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

to make the nightly news; elected officials must give sustained policy attention to security concerns. Ana Paula Ordorica, a Mexican political analyst, reinforced this view asking, “What evidence do we have that Mexico is central to American foreign policy?” O’Neil responded that Mexico has risen to the forefront of President Obama’s attention, sharing front-page status with Afghanistan and Iraq on the president’s daily foreign policy memo. The question is not whether Mexico has the United States’ attention in terms of security — it clearly does. The challenge is that the discussion has not broadened beyond securing the border.

Alex Saragoza, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, concurred that a paradigm shift in Washington is crucial. Whenever the U.S. media reports on Mexico, Americans hear about problems “over there” — from drugs to travel advisories to the H1N1 virus. And, in his view, the Mérida Initiative reinforces this perception.

Funding is dedicated almost entirely to solving the crisis “over there” in Mexico. Few resources are earmarked for addressing issues within the U.S. that contribute to the problem, namely reducing the demand for illegal drugs.

David Bonior, Chair of American Rights at Work and former U.S. Congressional Representative for Michigan’s 10th district, expanded on this issue, drawing out two practical implications. First, the way to decrease demand is to reduce the number of drug users in the United States, which means targeting hard-core addicts for rehabilitation. O’Neil agreed, citing research from the U.S. National Drug Control Strategy group which found that while hard-core addicts comprise only about 20 percent of American drug users, they consume 70 percent of all illegal drugs. Rehabilitating these chronic users would significantly reduce the demand for drugs in the United States. However California State Senator Gilbert Cedillo reminded the group that drug rehabilitation initiatives have never been politically popular. Getting measures like these through the policy-making process would require a broad coalition. He suggested that one way to meet this challenge might be to bring doctors on board and to frame the issue in terms of ensuring public health.

Bonior also stressed that the U.S. needs to control the trafficking of firearms. There are already laws in place to prevent individuals with arrest records from purchasing guns. However, gangs have begun recruiting young women with clean records as purchasers, drawing previously uninvolved individuals into criminal activity.

What would stronger controls on weapons trafficking look like, and would it be politically possible to enact them in the United States? Rafael Fernández de Castro, Presidential Advisor for International Affairs and

Photo by Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images.

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

A Texas gun store manager poses with her wares.

Competitiveness in Mexico, asked the members of the U.S. Congress present: “Is it impossible to enact a law banning assault weapons in the United States?” The perception in Mexico is that this policy would be highly effective in reducing international weapons trafficking but that it is a political impossibility due to the strength of the American gun rights lobby.

In response, Bob Filner, a member of Congress representing California’s 51st district, said that such a ban is possible, and the U.S. should try to enact one. While he acknowledged that this is a politically sensitive issue, Filner also claimed that there is sufficient support in the House. If President Obama took up this issue, it might get through the Senate as well.

Up until this point, the discussion on how the U.S. can take responsibility for its share of the security crisis had centered around two specific policies: providing treatment for hardcore drug addicts to reduce demand and enacting stronger controls on cross-border weapons trafficking. Within this conversation, Isaac Katz, Professor of Economics at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, observed that the discussion so far had overlooked a crucial point: Mexican cartels exist because the drug trade is profitable. The root of the

security problems that both countries face can be traced to the Mexican cartels’ extraordinarily high revenues, which he estimated to be $30 billion per year. The “paradox of the war on drugs,” Katz claimed, is that “the more resources you put into fighting drug cartels, the more profitable the activity becomes.” Decreasing U.S. demand and tightening gun control laws are components of an overall security strategy, but, Katz argued, “as long as we don’t discuss the legalization of drug production, drug trafficking and drug consumption, there will be these security issues again and again and again.” As a first step, part of the solution would be to strengthen Mexico’s financial system to prevent the cartels from laundering their profits with impunity.

With this comment, the participants began to discuss the practical challenges involved in strengthening Mexican institutions. Juan Ernesto Pardinas — a consultant for the Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad, a Mexican policy research group — shared Professor Katz’s concerns. Taking the challenge of institution-building a step further, Pardinas claimed that reforming the Mexican municipal police is crucial.

Municipal police forces were designed in the 19th century, and their structure has remained unchanged to >>

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the present day. As a result, they are unable to confront 21st-century threats. Over the past year, municipal forces in 22 states have engaged in shootouts, not with the drug traffickers, but with federal police forces. Why do locallevel officials protect drug kingpins and cartel members?

The municipal police live in the very neighborhoods that they protect. In the United States, this might be seen as an advantage, but within the context of cartel violence, it is a liability. Drug traffickers know where families live, where children attend school. Faced with these personal threats, municipal police find themselves protecting the traffickers’ interests instead of those of the state. Pardinas explained that Mexicans describe the situation as one of “plata o plomo” (silver or lead). Cooperation is rewarded with payment while standing in the way of the traffickers’ interests results in a bullet for yourself or your family.

García Medina responded to the issues that Katz and Pardinas raised, stating that efforts are in place to strengthen the rule of law and reform the municipal police. For example, some states are currently reforming their penal codes so that people can receive timely access to justice. However, she agreed that reforming the municipal police force is a difficult challenge. Municipal police officers tend to have little education and low salaries, so they are in no position to stand up to the cartels. She suggested that state governments should collaborate with the federal government to coordinate their response, possibly meeting weekly in each state.

Pardinas countered that within his state of Monterrey, increased coordination efforts among the three armed forces have been attempted for years, with few positive results. The essential issue is that municipal police whose families are threatened by the cartels will never prioritize the interests of the state over protecting their loved ones.

For this reason, Mexican state or federal police should relieve the municipal police forces of their front-line responsibilities. Responding to cartel violence should be addressed at the federal level.

And yet, O’Neil replied, federal armed forces are not well suited to internal policing efforts in any country. Militaries are generally not trained in domestic policing, nor should they be — these efforts are outside the scope of their proper role. In response, Fernández de Castro stressed that coordination remains essential.

Perhaps the emphasis should shift toward ensuring better information sharing between the U.S. and Mexico. Government agencies naturally tend to protect their intelligence, but in order to combat the cartels, information needs to f low at least as freely across the border as drugs and weapons do.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

“You have to be strategic about your resources… your state will be overwhelmed if you try to incarcerate… your way out of this problem.”

— Gil Cedillo, State Senator, California At this point, Ordorica asked García Medina to comment on the feasibility of funding broader educational and social initiatives within Mexico.

Specifically, if Mérida Initiative funds were channeled toward particular community projects, would Mexican elected officials view this as intruding on their sphere of inf luence? García Medina prefaced her answer by clarifying that she would respond not as a state governor or a party representative, but just as a Mexican citizen.

With that, she noted that the U.S. has been funding educational initiatives in Mexico for many years. In her home state of Zacatecas, this funding has been very well received, and it is producing positive results. For example, Carnegie Mellon University has partnered with Mexican secondary schools to teach students software development. In January 2010, this program was expanded to introduce elementary students to the field of robotics.

Initiatives like these are fundamentally connected to security concerns because they not only encourage youth to envision a positive future, they provide them with the tools and opportunities that they need to get there. With practical skills and job opportunities waiting for them, youth will be better able to resist the lure of the cartels.

With the time for discussion rapidly coming to a close, Pete Gallego, a state representative from Texas, observed that public support is critical for any of these proposed policy solutions to succeed. Clearly, the problem cannot be solved through military efforts alone. Community initiatives, reducing corruption on both sides of the border, strengthening democratic institutions and rehabilitating hard-core drug users are all part of the solution, yet most citizens don’t connect these issues with enhanced security. The challenge going forward is to gain public awareness and support.

This session of the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum resulted in a thorough and lively discussion that explored the merits and limitations of specific policy solutions to the security crisis. Although the participants did not reach consensus on every issue, one element is clear: the time for focusing on short-term security efforts is over.

Relations between Mexico and the U.S. can no longer be

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based on funding for weapons and military incursions alone. Doing so allows the drug cartels to set the agenda and does little to ensure results over the long term.

The Mexican state is not failing, but its institutions, particularly the rule of law, are weak. Reforming the municipal police so that they are protected from cartel threats is a key part of the solution. In addition, broader social initiatives to support economic opportunities for the middle class and education for youth will serve to strengthen democracy in Mexico. Cartels find it difficult to operate when democratic institutions are strong.

U.S. funding for the Mérida Initiative is welcome and necessary. No security strategy would be complete without basic military efforts to secure the border area.

However, security solutions cannot and must not stop there. The U.S. needs to address the corruption within its own ranks that allows illegal weapons to enter Mexico unchecked. Rehabilitating hardcore drug users, though politically difficult to implement, would do much to reduce drug demand, thus making the drug trade less profitable for the cartels.

Not all of these policy prescriptions can be easily enacted, but some of them must nevertheless go forward.

The current economic crisis has demonstrated once again that the world is increasingly interconnected, and security is no exception. As partners and neighbors, Mexico and the U.S. must accept shared responsibility for the security crisis and move forward with a common agenda focused on long-term solutions.

The Security Panel was a session of the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum held at UC Berkeley on August 23-25, 2009. The presenters included Amalia García Medina, Governor of Zacatecas, and Shannon O’Neil, the Douglas Dillon Fellow for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Wendy Muse Sinek is a Visiting Instructor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

Photo by Ed Carsi.

A vigil against violence in Mexico.

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The Bachelet Bounce

Photo by Alex E. Proimos.

President Michelle Bachelet on Chilean Independence Day, September 2009.

CHILE

The Bachelet Bounce

by Kirsten Sehnbruch

M

ichelle Bachelet’s place in Latin America’s history books is assured. When she was sworn into office on March 11, 2006, she became Chile’s first female president and the first popularly elected Latin American woman president who did not follow a politically prominent husband into office.

Equally remarkable was the success and stability of the coalition that she led to a fourth consecutive victory.

Since her election, Michelle Bachelet has become the most popular president in Chile’s history, at least since opinion polls began to ask the question. Recently, her approval ratings have approached or surpassed the 80 percent mark in all opinion surveys. Chile’s most reliable survey, run by the Centro de Estudios Públicos (Center for Public Studies, CEP) registered a 78 percent approval rate in October 2009.

Furthermore, this halo of political magic surrounds BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

not only the president herself, but also her government.

According to an October 2009 CEP survey, 69 percent approve of how the Bachelet government is managing the economy. Andrés Velasco is the most popular finance minister (normally a thankless task) that the country has ever had. And though the general approval ratings of her government are more disperse, they are far superior to those of the opposition coalition (41 percent vs. 27 percent, CEP).

During the early years of the Bachelet administration, I wrote a critical article in this publication that compared her government to Goethe’s poem about the sorcerer’s apprentice, who lost control of the spinning brooms and could not rein in the floods that threatened to drown him.

Now, however, towards the end of Bachelet’s four-year presidential term, it seems that no apprentice has ever been so successful at turning herself into a powerful sorcerer,

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

with record approval ratings in the face of an economic crisis, a high unemployment rate and an election defeat.

This begs several questions: How did President Bachelet achieve this feat? What did her government do for Chile? And why was the Concertación defeated in the January 19, 2010, presidential elections? (See “Chile Heads Right” on page 2 of this issue).

The years since 2006 have indeed been a rollercoaster ride for Michelle Bachelet. After the upbeat emotion surrounding her election triumph, she immediately faced a series of crises, including massive student protests, corruption scandals, labor unrest, internal governmental divisions and defections of political allies from the coalition parties, leading to the loss of her Senate majority. Worst of all, the major reorganization of Santiago’s transport system, known as the Transantiago Plan, went horribly wrong, leaving 6 million people stranded and facing appalling transportation conditions. The allegations of ineptitude and wrongdoing surrounding the Transantiago debacle led to a serious and sustained political crisis in

the Concertación and cost the Bachelet administration political capital in its first year of government.

The initial responses of Bachelet’s ministers and of the president herself to these crises were widely criticized.

Frequent cabinet changes and lack of coordination among different ministers gave the impression that the president lacked leadership and that the government was adrift.

There were even publicly voiced doubts about whether a woman could govern Chile. By December 2007, the president’s approval ratings had fallen to historic lows.

However, the turnaround in Bachelet’s fortunes in early 2009 was equally remarkable. It seems that the worldwide economic recession turned into an opportunity for the Bachelet government, mostly thanks to her administration’s management of the economy.

Instead of spending windfall profits from high copper prices, her minister of finance, Andrés Velasco, accumulated reserves in a sovereign wealth fund outside of Chile and paid down the national debt, resisting intense political pressure to tap into these reserves. When >>

Photo by Matt Hintsa.

The Radomiro Tomic copper mine in Antofagasta, Chile.

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Chileans expressed confidence in their economic future and government economic policies.

(Data from Centro de Estudios Públicos, Encuesta Nacional de Opinión Pública, October 2009).

the 2009 worldwide economic crisis Opinion polls give testimony hit, Velasco was able to put together a to how extraordinarily well the comprehensive stimulus package that economic crisis was managed kept Chile from experiencing as deep in Chile. Despite relatively high a crisis as other countries around the unemployment rates, the vast world. Ironically, therefore, President majority of Chileans did not Bachelet’s popularity took off just expect their economic situation to as the country slid into a brief and deteriorate during the next year. slight recession. Simultaneously, the However, none of these pension reform that the Bachelet developments alone can explain administration had instituted during President Bachelet’s stellar approval the early years of her government ratings. While it is still too early to supported household incomes as it judge her political legacy, there is no increased elderly citizens’ access to doubt that her options were limited pensions that doubled the amounts to by a newly shortened presidential which they were previously entitled. term. Many challenges remain:

Seventy-eight percent of Chileans approved of President Bachelet’s government.

(Data from Centro de Estudios Públicos, Encuesta Nacional de Opinión Pública, October 2009).

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electoral reform; constitutional reform; and reform of the political, social and economic structures that the Concertación inherited from the dictatorship. Nevertheless, the Bachelet administration has achieved profound shifts, particularly in the area of social policy.

The pension reform, for example, establishes a minimum standard of social security. In a country of stark inequalities, this is no mean feat. Moreover, the pension reform has been accompanied by a series of other social policy measures, such as the expansion of national health insurance services and the extension of childcare and unemployment benefits, which have established minimum guarantees of services for all Chileans. Although this policy was initiated during the Lagos administration with a comprehensive health insurance reform (a period during which President Bachelet was minister of health), her administration expanded this strategy to form what could be considered the basic structure of a welfare state. In particular, the expansion of benefits beyond the poorest segments of the population to include the burgeoning middle classes constitutes a significant step in an economy that until now had focused all its efforts on targeting only the poor, in line with the classic development models proposed by the Washington institutions during the 1990s.

Combined with her charismatic leadership and a political discourse (as well as specific measures) empowering women, the social policies of President Bachelet will form her historical legacy. She has succeeded in instilling a sense of entitlement among those excluded from Chile’s largely private provision of social insurance, which has empowered the electorate.

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Indeed, the fact that the Concertación lost the January presidential elections may, in part, be attributable to this success. The same electorate that enjoyed increased benefits also sought more opportunities and blamed the Concertación for the persistant inequalities that mark Chile. The profound shift that President Bachelet has achieved in terms of how the population thinks about social security was visible in the election discourse of the opposition’s candidate, Sebastián Piñera. After 20 years of voting against the most progressive elements of the Concertación’s proposed social reforms, Piñera had to promise further progress on social issues.

Above all though, President Bachelet’s most powerful legacy, and the outstanding achievement that will guarantee her place in the annals of history, is that she has been by far the most successful female president in Latin America. She will be remembered as a strong, caring leader with an impressive record of laying down the foundations of social change that focused on women,

not just symbolically by establishing Latin America’s first gender paritarian cabinet, but also practically, by providing women with more options in their lives and a greater sense of empowerment. Perhaps the best summary of her legacy is the assertive statement of Amparo García Oliva, the seven-year-old daughter of a friend of mine: “When I grow up, I want to be president of Chile.”

Kirsten Sehnbruch is a professor of Public Policy at the Instituto de Asuntos Publicos, Universidad de Chile.

Photo by Marceloa Agost/www.presidencia.cl.

President Bachelet visits with beneficiaries of the “Chile Grows With You” program.

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Culture and Politics in the Honduran Coup

Photo by Sandra Cuffe.

HONDURAS

Police and protestors in Honduras, July 2009.

Culture and Politics in the Honduran Coup

by Rosemary Joyce

O

n June 28, 2009, the elected civilian government of Honduras was overthrown by a military coup. In the wake of this event, Honduran citizens began demonstrations that continued despite constant threat of arrest, suspension of the rights of free speech and assembly and arbitrary imposition of curfews. The day after the coup, I started a blog that continues to provide access to Honduran scholars’ analyses of the political situation as well as contextual information about a country that has been virtually ignored in the United States since the end of the Contra War against Nicaragua.

How did an archaeologist find herself caught up in the aftermath of a coup? Described by the U.S. mainstream media as a conflict about presidential term limits, the coup was actually a response to the profound implications of broader policies. For the first time in modern Honduran history, there was a call for broad citizen participation, even in the realm of cultural heritage where I work.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Making of a Coup In my three decades working in Honduras, I have learned that election years are always tense, but the bitterness of 2009 was unprecedented. Honduran newspapers, never a source of particularly reliable information, turned into propaganda machines directed against the president for his alleged intention to remain in office beyond the end of his term.

The basis for these claims was the nonbinding opinion poll that President Zelaya had scheduled for June 28. The single question to be asked in the referendum read, “Are you in favor of having a question on the November ballot that would ask if people want to convene a constitutional assembly?” I personally saw the poll as entirely symbolic since it would be up to Congress, whose members were among the poll’s fiercest critics, to propose any binding referendum for the November ballot.

However, the prospect that poll results would

demonstrate the true level of dissatisfaction with the present form of Honduran government was apparently too threatening to allow. Researchers for the Latin American Public Opinion Project had already documented widespread disillusion in Honduras, not just with a specific government, but also with government in general. In a 2008 comparative study, they found that among all Latin Americans, Hondurans were the most dissatisfied with their government.

Citizens’ longstanding resignation to enduring poverty and corruption had turned into a profound sense of alienation.

Participation rates dropped below 50 percent in the 2005 congressional election. Participation in the presidential election held that same year was significantly higher, with 55 percent of those eligible casting a vote.

Thus, while President Zelaya entered office with less than a majority, a larger proportion of the Honduran electorate seemed to feel it was worth their time to vote for president than for Congress, where no term limits exist and politicians consolidate power and remain for decades.

Zelaya took office in 2006, during a time of rising oil prices. Honduras, which has no domestic supply, is particularly vulnerable to swings in the oil market. The new president acted almost immediately to secure alternative sources of petroleum, joining Venezuela’s Petrocaribe initiative, a maneuver that is commonly, if misleadingly, glossed as the start of his “move to the left.”

Analyses by Honduran economists like Miguel Cáceres Rivera suggest this decision was pragmatic, not ideological. Venezuela took 50 percent payment on an already low price for oil, financed the remainder for 25 years at 1 percent

Photo courtesy of Rosemary Joyce.

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

Signs protesting the coup government’s interference in research.

interest, would accept payment in kind in lieu of cash and would loan back much of the cash paid for use in development projects.

Reining in oil prices, along with a reform of the banking system that lowered interest rates from roughly 27 percent to around 11 percent, helped stabilize the Honduran economy. During Zelaya’s presidency, the national currency, the lempira, maintained its value for the first time in 20 years. But as Cáceres Rivera explained, the more globalized the business, the more the Honduran business community had to gain by resisting economic reforms. As long as the cost of labor in Honduras remained low, the profit from international sales of Honduran products went up. Confrontation increased between Zelaya’s government and the network of business, media and political interests that had grown in the 1990s to unite previously separate commercial and political elites. In the autumn of 2008, when Zelaya faced a mandate to establish wages for government employees, he increased the minimum wage by 60

percent. While this baseline wage still did not cover minimum food costs for a typical family, the dramatic rise was enough to bring about a revolt by the business community.

Some commentators have suggested the action was politically motivated, noting that Zelaya’s popularity increased sharply in the quarter following the increase.

It was against this backdrop that Zelaya decided to push for the public opinion poll on convening a constitutional convention. While opponents immediately charged that his sole concern was to lift restrictions on reelection, the promotional material for the poll emphasized political reforms, including the recall and censure of politicians and the election of Congress members by localized districts. Beyond the basics of public participation in government, the campaign materials mention guarantees of the rights of women and ethnic and racial minorities. It was this aspect of Zelaya’s agenda that made work on cultural heritage, including archaeology, politically dangerous. >>

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Culture and Politics in the Honduran Coup

History Is Dangerous In late August, protestors disrupted a lecture about Copán in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second largest city.

This Classic Maya archeological site was the first Unesco World Cultural Heritage Site in Honduras and remains the country’s only cultural World Heritage Site. The protestors carried signs demanding: “No to exclusive cultural policies” and “Yes to the democratization of culture.” A third reading “No to the mayanization of Honduran Culture” began to make clear why an archaeological talk was an appropriate place for political action against the coup.

“Mayanization” is a term coined by Honduran historian Darío Euraque, at the time the head of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) and himself under threat of dismissal by the de facto regime. Euraque has argued that cultural differences across prehispanic Honduras were erased and replaced by a single history of the Classic Maya, a civilization portrayed as having disappeared long ago. Mayanization thus renders invisible the indigenous groups still living in Honduran territory. The Classic Maya may have disappeared from Copán, but their Chorti Maya descendants remain and make demands for control of their land and of representations of their history, including that part recorded in inscriptions at Copán using grammar specific to Chorti. The Lenca language was declared dead by researchers in the 1970s, but the Lenca living throughout central and southern Honduras remain and today demand to know how they are related to the people who built the 20-meter-tall pyramid of Yarumela around 700 BC. The Mosquitia region in the eastern part of the country never was fully integrated into the Spanish colony of Honduras and guarded knowledge of large precolumbian settlements only revealed to archaeologists starting in the 1980s.

I do not work at Copán, however, nor in the Mosquitia or near any of the Lenca communities of Central and Southern Honduras. I have spent my career documenting archaeological traces in the fertile Ulua river valley, near San Pedro Sula. The region began experiencing explosive population growth and economic development in the late 1960s, and the city’s rapid expansion led to the IHAH’s 1977 decision to begin constructing a baseline inventory of archaeological sites in the face of their impending destruction.

But that was then, and this is now. Another sign at the August protest read: “No to the cancellation of archaeological projects outside Copán.”

While the poster did not specify which projects were being cancelled, it carried an image drawn from an object

excavated under the direction of a recent Berkeley Ph.D.: the logo of Currusté, an archaeological park inaugurated in early 2009. Located within the municipal boundaries of San Pedro Sula, the Currusté project was a product of policies put in place by the Ministry of Culture and the Institute of Anthropology under the Zelaya administration, calling for greater public participation in all governmentsponsored work. As public participatory research, the project was not just a dig but a collaboration. It was this policy of grounding research in public participation that made history dangerous.

Archaeology Matters My own research project under the Zelaya administration explored forgotten histories of race in north-coast Honduras through archaeological and historical anthropological research. It focused on contemporary Omoa, the site of a prehispanic indigenous town as well as the 18th-century Spanish colonial fort San Fernando de Omoa, built to defend the colony against the British and their Miskito allies.

During Zelaya’s presidency, the IHAH had its own goals for research and prioritized its support of projects according to their advancement of those goals. Its priorities included a clear sense that the Institute needed to develop projects in every part of the country in order to encourage public participation in historical research. Archaeological work was urgently pressed in places where the Institute had the opportunity to develop public parks, for the first time targeting local audiences, especially near cities like San Pedro Sula. Our proposal for work in the town of Omoa was given the go-ahead because it contributed to the Institute’s larger goal of building a new museum. This museum project, suspended after the coup, would have developed new historical themes for public presentation, bridging the gap that exists between townspeople and the international tourists visiting San Fernando de Omoa.

Omoa was of interest to us because documents from archives in Spain and Guatemala showed that the 18th-century community was internally complex.

Distant indigenous towns provided labor for the initial construction of the fort, as did contingents of enslaved Africans owned by the Spanish Crown. Once the fort was built, people from the indigenous towns of the Ulua River valley continued to provide labor in Omoa. There was also a population of what were called “free blacks” — African-descendant people who had escaped enslavement in British-controlled territory — working under the >>

Right: Stela H depicts the 13 ruler of Copán. th

(Photo by Rob Verhoeven.)

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Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

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Culture and Politics in the Honduran Coup

Photo by Will Klinger.

San Fernando de Omoa.

orders of the Commander of the Fort and enjoying an unprecedented degree of liberty. Omoa, we believed, would offer us the opportunity to explore a colonial community where the multiracial and multiethnic population of contemporary north-coast Honduras was forged. We hoped that it would allow us to understand how this historic complexity of population was forgotten.

For most of June 2009, our group from UC Berkeley excavated areas in the yard of the present museum.

Located in a historic building, the museum was once the headquarters of the Cuyamel Fruit Company and later became the intake center for prisoners condemned to the repurposed colonial fort; San Fernando de Omoa was formally designated a penitentiary in 1910. Historical memory of the prison is how people in the modern town and along much of the north coast personally relate to Omoa. When the fort became a national historic site in the 1970s, these connections were obscured in favor of a history of pirates of the Caribbean.

In addition to our excavation work, we also served as part of the scholarly writing committee for a new Omoa museum that was to contain a reinterpretation of the site.

The old historic building was to be preserved for offices and study space, and the new museum would locate that building in a continuing history of place at Omoa. Our finds in the summers of 2008 and 2009 would contribute BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

to the presentation of a history of occupation of the fort and town that neither began with the completion of the first version of the fortress, El Real, in about 1753, nor ended with independence in 1821. The history of the fort would be brought up to the present through work with local people considered to be community historians. In 2009, we recorded gravestones in the historic cemetery that reoccupied El Real after its abandonment, based on the urgings of community members in a public forum in 2008.

Under the cultural policies of the Zelaya administration, our work explicitly involved community participation. In 2008, these efforts included public forums held at the museum and systematic interviews of community members about what they felt were important historic questions. In 2009, we held weekend workshops as part of a nationwide program in which hundreds of Hondurans — from high school students to teachers to workers in the tourism sector — attended scholar-led tours of historic sites and received reading materials about Honduran history to which they would never have had access otherwise. The purpose of these workshops was not simply one-way transmission of information; rather, participants were taught techniques that they could use to create, in the words of Dr. Euraque, “textured histories” from their locally rooted perspectives and thereby contribute to the historic narrative of modern Honduras.

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

Connecting Cultural Policy and the Coup Our project came to a halt in the wake of the coup due to the end of international funding, the dismissal of Dr. Euraque and our own decision that continuing to work under the de facto regime would be, in a small way, to legitimate it. Myrna Castro, the newly appointed minister of culture, lost no time in opposing programs encouraging public participation in local history; she even denounced book distribution programs on the grounds that the recipients — rural farmers and indigenous and African-descendant people — were “vulnerable” to the supposedly subversive ideas they contained.

At the IHAH, Castro decried attempts to develop a broader range of archaeological parks as evidence of a lack of attention to Copán. She defined the Institute’s mission as increasing tourism rather than developing knowledge of the Honduran past, as legally mandated.

As if to underline the class interests that drove the coup, she chose to invest Institute funds in fashion shows, declaring, “Fashion is an industry, but it is also part of the culture of the people.”

Those who would reduce the complex Honduran past to a simple, saleable narrative in which a now-vanished Maya state dominated the land, found the cultural

research encouraged by the Zelaya administration not just superf luous but threatening. Rather than equating culture with consumption, the work we were doing placed an emphasis on the ways in which communities can create meaningful connections with the past. By putting the work of interpreting the national story in the hands of local communities, projects like ours were part of a move to empower the Honduran people. And that, in the end, is what the elite found intolerable.

Rosemary Joyce is a professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and has conducted archeological fieldwork in Honduras since 1977. To read her blog on the Honduran coup, go to http://hondurascoup2009.blogspot.com/.

Photo courtesy of Rosemary Joyce.

Berkeley doctoral candidate Doris Maldonado discusses the Currusté archaeological project with community members and Berkeley undergraduates.

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Waiting behing the bars of a Mexican prison.

FILM

(Photo courtesy of Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete.)

Presumed Guilty: Based on an Untrue Story

by Mary Ellen Sanger “Andar por la calle ya no es confiable… ¿Cuántos inocentes seguirán cayendo?”

“On the streets it’s not safe for us to walk… How many more innocents will fall?”

— Antonio Zúñiga Rodríguez

W

hen Antonio “Toño” Zúñiga raps at the end of the new documentary “Presumed Guilty” that it’s not safe to walk his streets in Mexico City, it’s not for fear of pickpockets, kidnappers, gunshots or gangs.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

“Ahora ya no queda cuidarse de la lacra; ahora hay que cuidarse de un oficial con placa.”

“Now we’re not so wary of the bad guys; now we’re careful of the officer with a badge.”

It’s the police, he warns, who are making the streets unsafe. Zúñiga speaks from experience: he spent more than three years in a Mexico City prison for a murder he did not commit.

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

Two young Mexican lawyers have made it their mission to take on the system that incarcerates innocents like Zúñiga. Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete, who call themselves “lawyers with cameras,” are a married couple whose effervescent charm belies their serious purpose. As they work toward their doctorates in Public Policy at UC Berkeley, they advocate for the filming of criminal court proceedings in Mexico, believing that cameras can be a tool for bringing transparency to the courts.

Their first-of-its-kind filming of Zúñiga’s case resulted in the chilling documentary, “Presumed Guilty,” which presents in gripping detail the harsh reality of Mexico’s trial system that is responsible for the almostroutine incarceration of innocent people. The film, directed by Hernández and award-winning documentary filmmaker Geoffrey Smith, made its world premier in September 2009 at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. It went on to win top recognition at the Morelia Film Fest and the Amnesty Award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival. The hair-raising footage of court proceedings seems artfully scripted for dramatic effect, but unfortunately it is all too real. At a recent public screening in Mexico, the crowd was up in arms, screaming at the judge on the screen, kicking the f loor and gesturing angrily.

“We didn’t actually realize we were making a film,” Hernández says, “until we found out we could get a retrial for Toño.”

Zúñiga was already in jail and sentenced to 20 years when Hernández and Negrete met him. On December 12, 2005, police officers grabbed Zúñiga off the street, handcuffed him and threw him in prison. His accuser was a minor who had previously been a suspect. “He’s the one” and a point of the finger. That’s all it took. Zúñiga and the young man who accused him had never met.

There was no arrest warrant. No evidence. The witnesses who had seen him 20 minutes away from the crime scene at the time of the murder appeared as handwritten names in a file of written reports and testimonies four inches thick and sewn together with twine. Zúñiga’s file was just one in a mountain of similar files in an archive room of the court. Nobody followed up. Why bother? He was already presumed guilty.

It’s an all-too-common story in Mexico, where police are paid bonuses for the number of arrests they make. Though the right to a fair trial has long been constitutional, it is only since 2008 that “fair” has been defined specifically to include the presumption of innocence and an oral trial. Currently, trials are held

with or without a judge present (usually without), with or without witnesses present (usually without) and with or without real evidence or an attorney for the defense.

Sheaves of paper are pushed back and forth across desks for signatures and stamped in triplicate. Defendants are often convicted without ever seeing the judge who sentenced them. This assembly line operation only very narrowly fits any definition of justice, as clerks, prosecutors, secretaries and judges “just do their jobs” within a dehumanizing system.

Getting camera teams inside that system is no small feat. While Mexicans have a constitutional right to a public trial, in reality everything happens behind closed doors.

Hernández and Negrete use the Constitution to negotiate access to trial proceedings. “This is a constitutional right, but there has been no precedent,” Negrete explains. “In general, a trial is so difficult to understand that almost nobody is even interested. Of course, the media has been in hearings, and they show images of people facing a trial, but they’ve never assembled the whole trial.”

Because the trials are so difficult to understand, even for lawyers like Negrete and Hernández, they found that cameras gave them the chance to better follow the proceedings.

“We get clarity from the cameras,” Hernández says.

“Without the cameras, you don’t know who’s who, what’s what, what’s the theory about the case, what are they trying to prove. There is no opening argument. You can’t hear anything; you don’t understand. It’s clearer in the film. I only found out certain things had happened when I was checking the footage.”

The film shows Zúñiga standing in a poorly lit area, face pressed up against the bars that separate and brand him, struggling to understand the convoluted proceedings. The high-pitched drone of ink-jet printers competes with the scraping of chairs on the tile f loor and the echo of legal banter — each word repeated by the judge for proper recording by the secretary. Zúñiga’s family and friends are present in the background, kept at bay by a four-foot wall.

While Zúñiga’s trial seems impersonal, he actually receives better-than-average treatment because of the presence of cameras. Normally, he would be tried simultaneously with up to 12 other defendants. It wouldn’t be “the Zúñiga trial,” it would be the “criminal trial of the day.” In front of the cameras, the judge — not generally present so there isn’t a designated space for him — stands through the entire proceedings, even wearing his robes.

The prosecutor is also dressed professionally. Witnesses >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Presumed Guilty

Photo courtesy of Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete.

The judge presides over Toño’s case.

for the prosecution are actually produced, though they testify only by not remembering the answers to any of the questions posed by the defense attorney.

“Toño is an everyday guy,” Hernández says, explaining why they decided to make a documentary of his legal battle. “It’s a case that’s very representative of what anybody who is arrested by the police might experience. It’s not a strange case, statistically.”

Negrete adds that fully 92 percent of the defendants in Mexican courts are convicted, in most cases without scientifically validated evidence. Testimonies and depositions are accepted simply because they have been stamped “received” and entered into the reams of paper that make up the case.

“We were researchers. We knew what the patterns were and what we wanted to change in the criminal justice system: lack of presumption of innocence, the way the system can convict without evidence, lack of professional standards for police,” says Negrete.

“You have these courts that are willing to convict based on anything,” her husband adds. “There is no need to develop forensic expertise. Get whatever… say whatever.

You’ll get the conviction anyway.”

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The 2008 constitutional amendment requiring the presumption of innocence and an oral trial signals an important opening for increased fairness. Hernández and Negrete hope the timely release of “Presumed Guilty” will help create enough public pressure to make sure the new law is enforced.

“One of the things we’ve noticed is that Mexican authorities don’t follow up very much. It’s easy for Mexico to enact or to reform a constitution,” Hernández muses. “José María Morelos was the first to do it. With the Constitution of Apatzingan in 1814, we had the right to be heard in trial and due process for the first time. But it never got implemented, and so it happened with the 1857 and 1917 Constitutions. They all talked about this right to a fair trial, but nobody has ever implemented it.”

For Negrete and Hernández, their film presents a unique opportunity to make people aware of just how unbalanced the court system is. “It’s incredible,” Negrete sighs. “So many Mexicans believe that we have an American courtroom — that we have the prosecutor, the defense, the judge and the trial. They believe that! Because they have never been in contact with a trial.”

Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

The team envisions a grassroots approach for the distribution of “Presumed Guilty.” Their earlier short film about the justice system, “El Túnel” (“The Tunnel”), was targeted at the political and economic elite. With their feature-length film, they hope that ordinary people will identify with its articulate “everyman” protagonist and begin to demand their right to a fair trial.

Hernández wants the inmates of Iztapalapa Prison, where Zúñiga was locked up, to be among the first to watch the film. “Because it’s incredible, they are the ones most hurt and most vulnerable, but at the same time, most empowered by their situation to fight it. If they don’t fight it, nobody else can. I think they all have a lot of fear — they are afraid if they demand anything, they will lose. They don’t know that the odds are already stacked against them.”

The film itself is a step toward reducing that stack of unbalanced odds. The product of an unlikely

collaboration between the brave and vulnerable Zúñiga and a pair of relatively privileged lawyers who chose not to ignore his call for help, “Presumed Guilty” is already making waves in Mexico and internationally. Negrete and Hernández hope that the documentary created through this rare instance of cooperation will become a tool with the power to reform the Mexican judicial system.

Mary Ellen Sanger lived in Mexico for 17 years. In 2003, she was incarcerated for 33 days in the Oaxaca State Penitentiary on invented charges that were eventually dropped.

“Presumed Guilty,” supported by the Center for Latin American Studies, will soon be premiering in the U.S. Please see http://www.presumedguiltythemovie.com (English) or www.presuntoculpable.org (Spanish).

Photo courtesy of Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete.

Toño dancing while in prison.

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Mamulengo

By Chico Simões

Brazil — a country known for its racially mixed cultural formations — is slowly coming to recognize and display the vitality of its popular cultures. These are the very cultures that the colonizing mentality, which also played a formative role in the nation, had always opposed. Mamulengo, or traditional puppet theater, is one example of this long-repressed cultural legacy.

Working in popular culture, and with mamulengo in particular, is a pleasure, a profession and a mission inherited from the masters of this tradition. It is also an effective means of holding up a mirror to the public. By identifying with the characters, their stories, their passions and their creative spirit, the spectator discovers the possibility of confronting life with creativity and humor.

Chico Simões holds the 2009 Mario de Andrade Chair in Brazilian Culture at UC Berkeley. A puppeteer and educator who specializes in traditional forms, Simões is the director of a Ponto de Cultura in Brasilia. He gave a presentation of mamulengo at UC Berkeley on April 16, 2009.

“La noche está estrellada, y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos” — Pablo Neruda, “Poema 20”, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Spring 2009

A panoramic view of the Milky Way Galaxy from El Paranal, Chile.

(Photo courtesy of the European Southern Observatory.)

‘‘The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance” — Pablo Neruda, “Poem 20,” Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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The telescopes of the European Southern Observatory at El Paranal, Chile.

Photo courtesy of the European Southern Observatory.

Center for Latin American Studies University of California, Berkeley 2334 Bowditch Street Berkeley, CA 94720

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