Our Good Neighbors

Many years ago, the journalist and investigator Mario Gill wrote a crucially important book which, as all valuable things such as best-sellers and other debris of self-esteem, has been lost: “Our Good Neighbors”. In this lost work, the investigator explores the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Like the work of Gastón García Cantú, such as “North American Interventions in Mexico”, the results overwhelmed us. Mario Gill’s work was closer to everyday life, the manner in which the United States maltreated us and at the same time subjugated us before the indifference of a ruling class that only waits for a vacation time in order to take their children to Disneyland. The pro-Yankee tendency has taken us to unimaginable places due to the electronic media and of course globalization. We have lost a good part of our identity. Young people already do not know so much of their own cultural baggage. To make matters worse, the false left, represented with precision by the PRD, assumes that by giving ice rinks in the middle of this brutal heat, it is to be at the same level as New York or Philadelphia. What is natural there, here is a crude and criminal copy, because the water is wasted and the money misspent in diversions for AMLO, today for Ebrard.

A violent critique by the U.S. State Department concluded yesterday, whereby Mexico was put in the seat of the accused at the international level. The Yankees blame Mexico, especially the army, for violating human rights in the war initiated by Felipe Calderon against drug trafficking, which kills criminals and innocent citizens indiscriminately. The complete note is alarming: Mexico is a torturous country that does not respect human life. Felipe Calderon answered timidly, saying that when the country has 32 efficient police bodies, one in each state, the army will return to the barracks. That is to say, never. The soldiers continue to patrol the streets and commit excesses and abuses. These are armed components trained to confront armies and guerrilla forces, not the drug trafficker that has more flexible means and, in almost every case, is better armed. The large amounts of money obtained illegally are of such a magnitude that those who participate are more daring and better supplied thanks to our accusers, the gringos.

We see things with a certain calm. The North Americans are the big consumers; it is normal that in a funny television program or in a dramatic film, someone takes drugs and everything turns out fine. The North American market is a portentous business that moves around $60 billion annually — Mr. Slim’s fortune — and continues to grow. But there is something worse, and it is not my intention to defend the fanaticism of the Mexican Army: I am someone who spent his youth fleeing it, especially during the days of the 1968 student movement, when teachers and my friends died and my life was spared miraculously.

Human rights are violated in the United States too. Not as many of their own as foreigners, but there is a long list of proven allegations in Afghanistan and Iraq to cite only the most obvious countries. Obama promised to close the base in Guantanamo, Cuba, but he did not. This site is an enclave of Muslim torture and unprecedented brutality that shows how far the United States will go in its mania to control the world, to maintain the superiority that God gave to the founding fathers: Manifest Destiny. Who judges or even accuses them, torturers and criminals of long tradition? Have we forgotten McCarthyism, when the anticommunist mania persecuted and incarcerated thousands of citizens who only believed something different or who simply were suspected of supporting other ideas that were not those of the ridiculous American Dream?

But the United States tends to its own matters, presents itself as a just and omnipotent God; to this end it is a military power without counterbalance. We do not even have an international policy, much less decorum. It will have to wait until WikiLeaks gives us some more precise information. I do not doubt that the Mexican Army will silence and hide information about its conduct in the war unleashed by Calderon, but this is an internal matter in which the presidency and human rights organizations are the ones that should make the prosecutions and the sentences.

Calderon has tried with scarce results to voice his displeasure with the Yankee opinions and intrusions. But nothing has been effective. Without a political personality like Lula, Chavez, Evo or Castro, the response has been insignificant arguments. Mexicans already put so much hope in Obama and the Democrats; they are quick to rectify. It has been well said by a Mexican joke, depicted by Mario Gill in the cited book, that when the politics of the “big stick” are no longer practiced, substituted for those of Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor”, it is they who are the neighbors and we the good.