Our reading club in the public library of Carboneras has started off with a workshop, aimed to help us all "read better." It has been more fun than I had expected -- our librarian María José Rufete has brought in
Waples, Douglas, Bernard Berlson, and Franklyn R. Bradshaw. 1940. What Reading Does to People. A Summary of Evidence on the Social Effects of Reading and a Statement of Problems for Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Excruciatingly dull--"pedestrian" the authors themselves call their conclusion, which is actually their starting point: that one has to take into account all the relevant "major factors"; survey of literature on reading tastes (who reads what), effects of propaganda (esp. Lasswell's work), etc. It is literally no more than "a summary of evidence," with no critique of any study mentioned. People read for (1) "instrumental effects" (learning something they want to know), (2) "prestige effects" (feeling better about themselves, e.g. by identifying with a dashing hero/heroine), (3) "reinforcement effects" (to strengthen their previously held opinions), (4) "aesthetic effects" (some people appreciate "belles lettres" for themselves), and/or (5) "respite effects" (to take a break). "Prestige" seems the most amusing as a category, could maybe become a short story.
2006/09/28
2006/09/27
Politics & demography: Spain's immigration problem
Every day TV news brings images of open boats crowded with Africans arriving in the Canary Islands. Sometimes a boat is crowded with people from further away, from Pakistan. Medical, judicial and customs personnel claim to be overwhelmed by the sudden increase in these "illegal" arrivals.
The Canaries (named not for the birds but for the fierce dogs or canes that used to roam there) were conquered by Spain in the 15th century and are now -- though geographically African -- a region of Spain, like Andalucía or Catalunya. If you can reach the Canaries, you have reached the European Union, and (if the Spanish authorities don't do something about it) you face no legal impediment to traveling anywhere in the EU. The Pakistanis who arrived the other day were probably heading to the United Kingdom, the French-speaking Africans from Mali, Senegal or Mauritania are probably thinking of France or Belgium. Thus, even though most of the French-speaking magrebíes (Morrocans and Algerians from the Maghreb) and Sub-Saharan Africans remain in Spain (where jobs are relatively plentiful), Spain's problem of immigration control is Europe's problem.
Or anyway, that's what the Spanish government is arguing in the European Parliament. Spain wants help in financing helicopters, patrol boats and vigilance systems (Spain has deployed several infrared detectors of outboard motors and human body warmth, but not enough to cope with the great numbers of clandestine immigrant craft). But so far countries remote from the African coast, and especially those with "conservative" (meaning, among other things, anti-immigrant) governments insist that controlling its borders is Spain's problem. Same with Malta and Italy, the other "front line" countries targeted by would-be immigrants from the south.
But then, how can it be just Spain's problem, if there are no longer any real borders among the European countries? Spain's coasts are now the southern frontier of all of Europe. It's the age-old philosphical debate, Whose responsibility is it to see to the welfare of all?
But there are also practical questions, not philosophical so much as sociological. First, What has spurred the great increase in illegal immigration in the past five or six years? Second, is this increase a problem for the richer countries that are receiving the immigrants? And if so, what kind of problem? Economic, political, cultural? And is it a problem (or perhaps a solution) for the poorer, sending countries? And thirdly, a sociological question which is also a big political question these days, regardless of whether it is really a problem or not, can it be stopped or even significantly reduced?
Here are some hypotheses.
1 - The main causes of increased illegal immigration may be a sudden relative impoverishment of the sending countries (relative to the beckoning prosperity of Spain and its northern neighbors). We'll need to look at the economic stats of the countries that sent the most migrants to Spain last year. OR it may be the increased efficiency of underground people-exporting business. OR the active recruitment by employers in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. Likely employers include construction industry, agriculture (big employer in southern Spain), and brothels, among others. All three of these things are going on, but which are more important probably varies by country.
These (rounded) figures are for numbers of applications for residence in Spain last year (thus, not counting the undocumented), but they may give an idea of the proportions:
AFRICA
Morocco 63,000
Algeria 8,000
Senegal 7,000
Nigeria 5,000
Mauritania 3,000
SOUTH AMERICA
Ecuador 21,000
Colombia 14,000
Brazil 3,000
Argentina 3,000
EUROPE
Rumania 9,000
Poland 4,000
Ukraine 4,000
Bulgaria 3,000
ASIA
China 10,000
Pakistan 6,000
Further thoughts to come.
(This note is two days later than promised. My apologies. Things happen.)
The Canaries (named not for the birds but for the fierce dogs or canes that used to roam there) were conquered by Spain in the 15th century and are now -- though geographically African -- a region of Spain, like Andalucía or Catalunya. If you can reach the Canaries, you have reached the European Union, and (if the Spanish authorities don't do something about it) you face no legal impediment to traveling anywhere in the EU. The Pakistanis who arrived the other day were probably heading to the United Kingdom, the French-speaking Africans from Mali, Senegal or Mauritania are probably thinking of France or Belgium. Thus, even though most of the French-speaking magrebíes (Morrocans and Algerians from the Maghreb) and Sub-Saharan Africans remain in Spain (where jobs are relatively plentiful), Spain's problem of immigration control is Europe's problem.
Or anyway, that's what the Spanish government is arguing in the European Parliament. Spain wants help in financing helicopters, patrol boats and vigilance systems (Spain has deployed several infrared detectors of outboard motors and human body warmth, but not enough to cope with the great numbers of clandestine immigrant craft). But so far countries remote from the African coast, and especially those with "conservative" (meaning, among other things, anti-immigrant) governments insist that controlling its borders is Spain's problem. Same with Malta and Italy, the other "front line" countries targeted by would-be immigrants from the south.
But then, how can it be just Spain's problem, if there are no longer any real borders among the European countries? Spain's coasts are now the southern frontier of all of Europe. It's the age-old philosphical debate, Whose responsibility is it to see to the welfare of all?
But there are also practical questions, not philosophical so much as sociological. First, What has spurred the great increase in illegal immigration in the past five or six years? Second, is this increase a problem for the richer countries that are receiving the immigrants? And if so, what kind of problem? Economic, political, cultural? And is it a problem (or perhaps a solution) for the poorer, sending countries? And thirdly, a sociological question which is also a big political question these days, regardless of whether it is really a problem or not, can it be stopped or even significantly reduced?
Here are some hypotheses.
1 - The main causes of increased illegal immigration may be a sudden relative impoverishment of the sending countries (relative to the beckoning prosperity of Spain and its northern neighbors). We'll need to look at the economic stats of the countries that sent the most migrants to Spain last year. OR it may be the increased efficiency of underground people-exporting business. OR the active recruitment by employers in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. Likely employers include construction industry, agriculture (big employer in southern Spain), and brothels, among others. All three of these things are going on, but which are more important probably varies by country.
These (rounded) figures are for numbers of applications for residence in Spain last year (thus, not counting the undocumented), but they may give an idea of the proportions:
AFRICA
Morocco 63,000
Algeria 8,000
Senegal 7,000
Nigeria 5,000
Mauritania 3,000
SOUTH AMERICA
Ecuador 21,000
Colombia 14,000
Brazil 3,000
Argentina 3,000
EUROPE
Rumania 9,000
Poland 4,000
Ukraine 4,000
Bulgaria 3,000
ASIA
China 10,000
Pakistan 6,000
Further thoughts to come.
(This note is two days later than promised. My apologies. Things happen.)
2006/09/25
Günter Grass
It's hard to take seriously the expressions of shock and disdain at Günter Grass's recent revelation that he was, very briefly in the last months of the war when he was 17, a member of the SS. It's not as though we hadn't known that he was a Nazi sympathizer as a youth or that he had served in the armed forces (in an anti-aircraft unit initially). He had reserved this embarrassing added detail, as he told interviewer Hermann Tertsch in El País, until he was ready and had found a way to tell it. But in fact his most famous work is all about coming to terms with, and unsuccessful denials of, the unacceptable past. That in any event is the theme that came through most strongly in the novel I just finished reading, Dog Years.
I had picked up this novel just by chance, a week or so before Grass reappeared in the headlines for his new memoir. Now I want to read its predecessors in the Danzig Trilogy, The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse. (Little by little and author by author, I'm trying to make up for my cultural deficits.)
See Günter Grass - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I had picked up this novel just by chance, a week or so before Grass reappeared in the headlines for his new memoir. Now I want to read its predecessors in the Danzig Trilogy, The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse. (Little by little and author by author, I'm trying to make up for my cultural deficits.)
See Günter Grass - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2006/09/22
Back in touch!
Just a little more than an hour ago, we got our ADSL connection established in the place we're renting here in Carboneras, Spain. To celebrate, I plan to inaugurate a new series of "Letters from Spain," aimed at telling U.S. readers what I think my countrymen might want to know about the many things happening, very rapidly, in this country. Beginning next Monday, I intend to post such an essay weekly, to attract some new readers, to interest those I already have, and to come to a better understanding of Spain myself.
There are several reasons why Spanish politics and cultural dynamics should interest U.S. readers. Since 1492 the country has been the most powerful node amplifying and retransmitting currents between Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and a large part of its internal turmoil has to do with the static from all those currents. The topics I plan to take up here (one at a time or in combination) suggest how wide are the effects of Spanish political and cultural events. These topics include:
• Immigration (from Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe) and the dilemma it presents to the social equality and civil liberties agenda of the Socialist Party.
• The water crisis, and the urgency of strengthening Spain’s weak instruments for water management and conservation.
• Depradations of the consumer society: the paving of the coast and countryside and the corruption of municipal governments, more blatant here than in most places (except maybe Italy)
• Church, state and civil liberties: in the face of Catholic tradition and (possibly related) tradition of machismo, Spain is pioneering laws against domestic violence and facilitating abortion, divorce and homosexual marriage
• Confronting terrorism: ETA, Al-Qaeda, and Spanish troops in Lebanon and Afghanistan.
And much else. For starters I want to say something about immigration -- which is more of a political than a demographic problem.
But first, a clarification of an earlier note. Some of you have taken the trouble to look up this town (as I suggested) in Google Earth, and were wondering exactly where to find our building project. These are the coordinates: 37˚00'32.22" N, and 1˚53'12.12" W.
There are several reasons why Spanish politics and cultural dynamics should interest U.S. readers. Since 1492 the country has been the most powerful node amplifying and retransmitting currents between Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and a large part of its internal turmoil has to do with the static from all those currents. The topics I plan to take up here (one at a time or in combination) suggest how wide are the effects of Spanish political and cultural events. These topics include:
• Immigration (from Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe) and the dilemma it presents to the social equality and civil liberties agenda of the Socialist Party.
• The water crisis, and the urgency of strengthening Spain’s weak instruments for water management and conservation.
• Depradations of the consumer society: the paving of the coast and countryside and the corruption of municipal governments, more blatant here than in most places (except maybe Italy)
• Church, state and civil liberties: in the face of Catholic tradition and (possibly related) tradition of machismo, Spain is pioneering laws against domestic violence and facilitating abortion, divorce and homosexual marriage
• Confronting terrorism: ETA, Al-Qaeda, and Spanish troops in Lebanon and Afghanistan.
And much else. For starters I want to say something about immigration -- which is more of a political than a demographic problem.
But first, a clarification of an earlier note. Some of you have taken the trouble to look up this town (as I suggested) in Google Earth, and were wondering exactly where to find our building project. These are the coordinates: 37˚00'32.22" N, and 1˚53'12.12" W.
2006/09/14
The drive for war
Mark Engler has just sent me and other friends a copy of his review of A history of nonviolence | Salon Books, by Mark Kurlansky. Kurlansky maintains (among other things) that "The case can be made that it was not the American Revolution that secured independence from Britain; it was not the Civil War that freed the slaves; and World War II did not save the Jews." Rather, all these goals could have been achieved more cheaply (in money and human lives) and efficiently by non-violent political struggle.
I agree with Mark Engler's conclusions. Kurlansky makes an interesting, even stimulating argument, but hardly convincing when applied to extreme cases. For example, the Nazi genocide in Holland, Ukraine, Poland and other countries could hardly have been stopped by the type of non-violent resistance that proved effective in Denmark. Perhaps American independence from Britain could have been achieved without war (after all, the Canadians managed it), but there are deep, ineluctable reasons why that option was not attractive to the most influential colonists in Boston, Virgina, Philadelphia and New York.
I recently read William James' Varieties of Religious Experience (see my note), which is one of the places where he talks about the "moral equivalence to war". James recognized a psychological need (among males -- he is very insistent on the "masculine" character of this impulse) to kill, destroy or at least to test oneself by undergoing physical hardship. Sea voyages and mountain climbing might do the trick, but James was more taken by monastic penitents, who forced themselves to undergo hunger or other forms of deprivation or pain.
As I think James would say, the violence of the American war of independence, or "revolution", and the other wars Kurlansky discusses, is the expression of some deep, "hard-wired" or instinctive need to strike out and to test oneself. Whether or not such violence is the best way of accomplishing some political goal is quite beside the point. As in Bush's totally unnecessary war on Iraq, the political goals are generally merely pious lies to cover the drive to demonstrate one's high testosterone count. More recently I've been reading Günter Grass, Dog Years (more on that in a later note) which seems to confirm this hypothesis. Especially, it helps understand why passive resistance to Hitler became almost inconceivable to many German men, even when they were dimly aware that the Führer was marching them to their doom.
I agree with Mark Engler's conclusions. Kurlansky makes an interesting, even stimulating argument, but hardly convincing when applied to extreme cases. For example, the Nazi genocide in Holland, Ukraine, Poland and other countries could hardly have been stopped by the type of non-violent resistance that proved effective in Denmark. Perhaps American independence from Britain could have been achieved without war (after all, the Canadians managed it), but there are deep, ineluctable reasons why that option was not attractive to the most influential colonists in Boston, Virgina, Philadelphia and New York.
I recently read William James' Varieties of Religious Experience (see my note), which is one of the places where he talks about the "moral equivalence to war". James recognized a psychological need (among males -- he is very insistent on the "masculine" character of this impulse) to kill, destroy or at least to test oneself by undergoing physical hardship. Sea voyages and mountain climbing might do the trick, but James was more taken by monastic penitents, who forced themselves to undergo hunger or other forms of deprivation or pain.
As I think James would say, the violence of the American war of independence, or "revolution", and the other wars Kurlansky discusses, is the expression of some deep, "hard-wired" or instinctive need to strike out and to test oneself. Whether or not such violence is the best way of accomplishing some political goal is quite beside the point. As in Bush's totally unnecessary war on Iraq, the political goals are generally merely pious lies to cover the drive to demonstrate one's high testosterone count. More recently I've been reading Günter Grass, Dog Years (more on that in a later note) which seems to confirm this hypothesis. Especially, it helps understand why passive resistance to Hitler became almost inconceivable to many German men, even when they were dimly aware that the Führer was marching them to their doom.
2006/09/08
In case you were wondering
Susana and I are back in Spain, where we're building a small condominium (7 units) on the sea. We arrived last Friday, after a couple of months back in Manhattan, settling accounts and packing and trying to get some of our writing done. We've spent this week getting settled into the apartment in Carboneras that we're renting for the duration of our building project, which we expect to have completed by late fall 2007.
We got our book cases set up, and the books themselves have begun arriving (in boxes in the USPS's "M-bags", the cheapest way to ship books), so we expect next Monday to get back to our much interrupted work on our next book: a history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America (to be published by W. W. Norton once we finally get it finished). If you want to see just where we are, go to Google Earth and type in "Carboneras, Almería, Spain". The aerial photography is amazingly detailed. We can even find our construction site. Just keep going up the coast from the three ports in town (the cement factory's, Endesa's, and the fishing port), past the outcropping of beach called "La Puntica", to the NE edge of town.
We got our book cases set up, and the books themselves have begun arriving (in boxes in the USPS's "M-bags", the cheapest way to ship books), so we expect next Monday to get back to our much interrupted work on our next book: a history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America (to be published by W. W. Norton once we finally get it finished). If you want to see just where we are, go to Google Earth and type in "Carboneras, Almería, Spain". The aerial photography is amazingly detailed. We can even find our construction site. Just keep going up the coast from the three ports in town (the cement factory's, Endesa's, and the fishing port), past the outcropping of beach called "La Puntica", to the NE edge of town.
2006/08/30
More on Mexico: What to watch for
Remember my questions about the Mexico election dispute? (See below: posting of 2006/08/27.) Fred Rosen has given me permission to post his very thoughtful replies. He's a keen observer, and was definitely the right man to ask about these issues.
Hi Geoff,
Good questions; the subject of lots of speculation and few hard answers.
First, lots of panistas and other anti-perredistas, more-or-less sure of their victory have endorsed a recount for the sake of legitimacy. The word is that Fox, for reasons unknown, convinced Calderón not to take that position. Maybe he (and other high-ranking panistas) knew of some fraud (perhaps, as you suggest, by PRI operatives in northern Mexico). Maybe they foresaw AMLO's civil disobedience and welcomed it as a way to marginalize (they thought) AMLO and the PRD. Maybe they think they can coopt the neoliberal wing of the PRI and rule a polarized Mexico more effectively than Fox was able to rule a "consensual" political class that emerged from the "voto útil." I think (thinking as a panista) that was a huge mistake. Combined with the bronca in Oaxaca and the regular drug-cartel shootouts, Mexico may well become ungovernable. Not good for business (though maybe good for the other half of the PAN culture: the Catholic Church).
Second, AMLO's political future is pretty cloudy no matter how this turns out. He is already mistrusted by the loyal cardenistas in the party for being too much of an opportunistic centrist. The street actions may have been directed at those militants who, based on no policy proposals whatsoever but rather on AMLO's willingness to take the struggle to the streets, now accept him as a "moral leader" of sorts. On the other hand, he is now mistrusted by those center-left voters whose votes he got on July 2 but who now may feel that he has auto-demonized himself, much the way he was pictured in the PAN commercials calling him a danger to Mexico. The street actions are mobilizing fewer and fewer people and are alienating a crucial sector of the electorate.
As for the PRD, they just won in Chiapas against a multi-party coalition. As a "collection of tribes" they have a lot more contenders than AMLO, and they (as a party) are not taking the brunt of the blame for the disruptions. PAN so effectively demonized AMLO as a human being that very little of it stuck to the party.
I don't think we know yet how this will all play out for the PRI. They have been marginalized -- for now. They have some pretty savvy operatives (like Elba Esther Gordillo) and could bounce back under new leadership. Most of those operatives are playing a waiting game now to see how they might play their strongest cards in the upcoming legislative season and the Calderón sexenio. My gut feeling, however, is that Elba Esther and the salinista neoliberals will drift into the PAN while the social democratic corporatists will join with their "primos hermanos" in one wing or another of the PRD. We'll see.
un abrazo,
Fred
Hi Geoff,
Good questions; the subject of lots of speculation and few hard answers.
First, lots of panistas and other anti-perredistas, more-or-less sure of their victory have endorsed a recount for the sake of legitimacy. The word is that Fox, for reasons unknown, convinced Calderón not to take that position. Maybe he (and other high-ranking panistas) knew of some fraud (perhaps, as you suggest, by PRI operatives in northern Mexico). Maybe they foresaw AMLO's civil disobedience and welcomed it as a way to marginalize (they thought) AMLO and the PRD. Maybe they think they can coopt the neoliberal wing of the PRI and rule a polarized Mexico more effectively than Fox was able to rule a "consensual" political class that emerged from the "voto útil." I think (thinking as a panista) that was a huge mistake. Combined with the bronca in Oaxaca and the regular drug-cartel shootouts, Mexico may well become ungovernable. Not good for business (though maybe good for the other half of the PAN culture: the Catholic Church).
Second, AMLO's political future is pretty cloudy no matter how this turns out. He is already mistrusted by the loyal cardenistas in the party for being too much of an opportunistic centrist. The street actions may have been directed at those militants who, based on no policy proposals whatsoever but rather on AMLO's willingness to take the struggle to the streets, now accept him as a "moral leader" of sorts. On the other hand, he is now mistrusted by those center-left voters whose votes he got on July 2 but who now may feel that he has auto-demonized himself, much the way he was pictured in the PAN commercials calling him a danger to Mexico. The street actions are mobilizing fewer and fewer people and are alienating a crucial sector of the electorate.
As for the PRD, they just won in Chiapas against a multi-party coalition. As a "collection of tribes" they have a lot more contenders than AMLO, and they (as a party) are not taking the brunt of the blame for the disruptions. PAN so effectively demonized AMLO as a human being that very little of it stuck to the party.
I don't think we know yet how this will all play out for the PRI. They have been marginalized -- for now. They have some pretty savvy operatives (like Elba Esther Gordillo) and could bounce back under new leadership. Most of those operatives are playing a waiting game now to see how they might play their strongest cards in the upcoming legislative season and the Calderón sexenio. My gut feeling, however, is that Elba Esther and the salinista neoliberals will drift into the PAN while the social democratic corporatists will join with their "primos hermanos" in one wing or another of the PRD. We'll see.
un abrazo,
Fred
Naguib Mahfouz -In Memoriam
The man credited with inventing the modern Egyptian novel, Nobel-prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, has just died at age 94. As my little homage, I give you links to my notes on his audacious early novel Children of Gebelawi (which provoked a knifing attack on him by a God-crazed Muslim), and his politically daring short novel The Day the Leader Was Killed -- about frustrations of the Cairene lower-middle class running parallel to but separate from the crises leading to the death of Anwar al-Sadat on October 6, 1981.Here's Naguib Mahfouz - Biography
And here is today's obit from the Washington Post: Nobel prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz dies
2006/08/28
Some Palestinian voices: Captured Prisoners
Moving testimonies by Palestinian former prisoners and "detainees" (imprisoned without charges and often without provocation) of the Israeli military can be seen and heard here: Captured Prisoners
That the Israeli punishment of the people they have conquered is generalized, arbitrary and cruel, and that it has gone on for decades, is not surprising. That is what occupying forces do. It is what U.S. forces are doing in Iraq (not just in Abu Ghraib, but the rapes of teenagers, the destruction of whole cities and all the rest), what the Spanish conquistadores did when they mutilated and massacred inoffensive people in the "New World," the Japanese to the Chinese in Manchukuo and elsewhere, the Germans of the 1940s everywhere in Europe that they conquered. Israelis are only human, which means they can be as savage as the rest of us, no matter what their humanitarian traditions.
What I find harder to explain, and impossible to justify, is the elaborate structure of denial of this cruelty and savagery, maintained by U.S. and British opinion-formers (Rupert Murdoch and friends, other TV and newspapers, preachers, politicians). And especially their insistent claim that Israel is a "democracy." Democracy means "government by the demos, i.e. by the people governed." But in Israel half of the demos it governs is crushed under its army's boots -- including those Arabs to whom it has deigned to grant citizenship and especially all those in the occupied territories to whom it has not.
People in most of the world are not taken in by this; it seems mainly a U.S. and British self-deception (and not all the Brits are convinced, either). So, though it doesn't solve anything, it gives a certain sporting pleasure to see and hear George Galloway go after one of those media people committed to supporting the deception. Check out YouTube - George Galloway Vs. Sky News - SKY NEWS KO'D!!!
That the Israeli punishment of the people they have conquered is generalized, arbitrary and cruel, and that it has gone on for decades, is not surprising. That is what occupying forces do. It is what U.S. forces are doing in Iraq (not just in Abu Ghraib, but the rapes of teenagers, the destruction of whole cities and all the rest), what the Spanish conquistadores did when they mutilated and massacred inoffensive people in the "New World," the Japanese to the Chinese in Manchukuo and elsewhere, the Germans of the 1940s everywhere in Europe that they conquered. Israelis are only human, which means they can be as savage as the rest of us, no matter what their humanitarian traditions.
What I find harder to explain, and impossible to justify, is the elaborate structure of denial of this cruelty and savagery, maintained by U.S. and British opinion-formers (Rupert Murdoch and friends, other TV and newspapers, preachers, politicians). And especially their insistent claim that Israel is a "democracy." Democracy means "government by the demos, i.e. by the people governed." But in Israel half of the demos it governs is crushed under its army's boots -- including those Arabs to whom it has deigned to grant citizenship and especially all those in the occupied territories to whom it has not.
People in most of the world are not taken in by this; it seems mainly a U.S. and British self-deception (and not all the Brits are convinced, either). So, though it doesn't solve anything, it gives a certain sporting pleasure to see and hear George Galloway go after one of those media people committed to supporting the deception. Check out YouTube - George Galloway Vs. Sky News - SKY NEWS KO'D!!!
2006/08/27
Mexico: All politics is intra-party
Fred Rosen, based in Mexico City, just sent me his latest column on Andrés Manuel López Amador's (AMLO's) campaign for vote-recount: Everybody’s right and everybody’s wrong (Miami Herald/El Universal, Saturday, August 26, 2006). He argues that "AMLO’s evidence of hands-on, election-day fraud has been weak and, in many cases as deliberately oblivious to the facts as the PAN’s general campaign," but that the campaign run by the apparent victor, Calderón was dirty and possibly unfair -- unless you believe, like U.S.party operatives, that slander is "fair" in politics. And, says Fred, while "public opinion" according to polls doesn't entirely trust López Obrador, it/they (the public) generally think a recount is in order. He concludes, "A certain acceptance of contradictions, a certain being-of-two-minds seems necessary to understand the frequently bizarre, occasionally surreal post-electoral process Mexico is now living through."
I just sent Fred this note, which I share with you:
Well, all your points seem well-argued, but where does that leave us? Or rather, where does it leave the Mexican electorate?
Some questions that I hope to see explored (maybe someone already had and you can point me to the analysis):
(1) If Calderón is truly convinced that he won a majority, why does he not endorse AMLO's demand for a recount? Or more specifically, what would be the political (or other) costs to him of doing so?
As a first guess, I'd think maybe he owes rather specific debts to PRI operatives, who most likely were involved in whatever vote-tampering took place. If he allows them to be embarrassed, they can surely make life very difficult for him (by claiming greater fechorías on the part of the PAN, for example, or by sabotaging a future Calderón government from their seats in Congress). He probably also fears embarrassing copartidarios who may also have been involved.
(2) What political future might AMLO have if he conceded? Probably not much: His heir as gobernador of the D.F. seems better positioned to take the reins of the PRD, don't you think? Or maybe not -- might the PRD split? It's more of a federation of groups than a tightly unified party on the PRI model, was my impression. And that federation could just fall apart into its component pieces (especially since the new Mexico City mayor's bona fides have been questioned by rivals in the PRD, and given obvious though muted friction between AMLO and Cárdenas). If I'm right, then AMLO's insistence on his recount campaign is as much a question of internal PRD politics as of a supposed national interest.
(3) What might be the PRD's prospects if AMLO conceded? Could Calderón reasonably expect to govern if PRD legislators, and the Mexico City government, opposed him fiercely? Is it reasonable to suppose that the PRD as a party might do quite well for itself, and position itself for power in the next sexenio, if AMLO were out of the picture?
That's my guess, but I'm just observing from a distance, and there must be many important issues I haven't considered.
(4) And what does the PRI have to gain or to lose in the outcome of this recount campaign?
In short, what I think would be most useful would be to look at the internal dynamics of the three major parties to clarify why they're doing what they're doing and possible results.
I just sent Fred this note, which I share with you:
Well, all your points seem well-argued, but where does that leave us? Or rather, where does it leave the Mexican electorate?
Some questions that I hope to see explored (maybe someone already had and you can point me to the analysis):
(1) If Calderón is truly convinced that he won a majority, why does he not endorse AMLO's demand for a recount? Or more specifically, what would be the political (or other) costs to him of doing so?
As a first guess, I'd think maybe he owes rather specific debts to PRI operatives, who most likely were involved in whatever vote-tampering took place. If he allows them to be embarrassed, they can surely make life very difficult for him (by claiming greater fechorías on the part of the PAN, for example, or by sabotaging a future Calderón government from their seats in Congress). He probably also fears embarrassing copartidarios who may also have been involved.
(2) What political future might AMLO have if he conceded? Probably not much: His heir as gobernador of the D.F. seems better positioned to take the reins of the PRD, don't you think? Or maybe not -- might the PRD split? It's more of a federation of groups than a tightly unified party on the PRI model, was my impression. And that federation could just fall apart into its component pieces (especially since the new Mexico City mayor's bona fides have been questioned by rivals in the PRD, and given obvious though muted friction between AMLO and Cárdenas). If I'm right, then AMLO's insistence on his recount campaign is as much a question of internal PRD politics as of a supposed national interest.
(3) What might be the PRD's prospects if AMLO conceded? Could Calderón reasonably expect to govern if PRD legislators, and the Mexico City government, opposed him fiercely? Is it reasonable to suppose that the PRD as a party might do quite well for itself, and position itself for power in the next sexenio, if AMLO were out of the picture?
That's my guess, but I'm just observing from a distance, and there must be many important issues I haven't considered.
(4) And what does the PRI have to gain or to lose in the outcome of this recount campaign?
In short, what I think would be most useful would be to look at the internal dynamics of the three major parties to clarify why they're doing what they're doing and possible results.
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