January
5, 2006
Happy New Year
By
Jack D. McNamara
The long holiday
which began before Christmas (and lingers still, pending the Wednesday,
January 4 Rose Bowl) inevitably generated much solemn commentating from
pundits large and small. The year 2005 was definitely not a good year
so our fellow pundits were unusually stimulated.
The awfulness of the year past was specified in the details of two big
stories — the war in Iraq and hurricane Katrina. Both reminded us of
the saga of incompetence our governments provide us in unusual times.
Both focused on the American presi- dency and then followed the horror
down through the various layers of bureaucrats, demonstrating how
things do not work.
Such Big Themes hammered into our consciousness become suspect however.
Partisan political propaganda is so pervasive that most of us have a
natural resistance to “blame” stories built into our systems. The more
we are told something is certainly just so, the more skeptical we
become. If Iraq and Katrina are so awful, perhaps it is because those
events are so constantly reported with a particular emphasis on the
down side? Every disaster is an opportunity to spend more public money
if we can only repackage the event with our own propaganda.
We look therefore for other events during the year, especially near
Christmas, for other news. We look for news which is specific in time
and place and which may tell us something directly and unambiguously of
the human condition.
Our selection, however, is a story whose facts are so stark as to make
multiple interpretations irrelevant. It comes from Nuevo Laredo on
December 20, 2005. The San Antonio Express News headline, repeated in
many other reports, was “Nuevo Laredo has own Valentine’s Day
Massacre.” Five men were shot to death in a mechanic’s garage where
“the men were playing cards around a table.” Their ages ranged from 50
to a young man in his 20s and the newspaper speculated they were linked
to the “Zetas,” Mexican narcotics cartel enforcers. Three were killed
at the card table, another was shot as he ran away, and the fifth “was
found shot underneath a car.”
This event, horrible as it is, was part of a pattern in the unhappy
Nuevo Laredo in 2005. The Laredo Morning Times on New Year’s Eve
published the box score of border violence for the city of one-half
million. There were at least 176 violent deaths, maybe 200. That number
includes 17 police officers, including the police chief gunned down
just hours after he was sworn in on June 9. A few weeks later a city
councilman was murdered.
In June the Mexican federal government took over Nuevo Laredo and
ordered the local police off the streets. The U.S. Consulate was
closed. Many policemen were purged after drug tests. “We are living in
anarchy,” said a journalist of 50 years in the city.
Violence does engender anarchy. So does incompetence, as we saw in
hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. Governments are formed to establish both
security and order, among other things. Some of those other things are
handing out the boodle. Laredo-Nuevo Laredo has been the recipient of
massive flows of boodle over recent years. “Dos Laredos” is the
showplace for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) economic
model. Large expensive highways bisect Texas and Mexico, meeting their
maquiladoras at Laredo.
On the day following the massacre at the garage U.S. Representative
Henry Cuellar (D-Laredo) toured the U.S. side announcing to the Laredo
Manufacturing Association that he had “brought” $855 million to the
area in the last year.
Recently, however, Laredo (and Webb County) is a central part of the
coalition of U.S. border counties seeking additional federal dollars to
beef up security at the border by direct infusions of assistance to
Texas county sheriffs. With one hand(out) we boost economies and with
the other hand(out) we try to clean up the mess.
As the U.S. Congress reconvenes after their recess we will be watching
to see how they handle these and other border questions. If you are an
optimist you might argue that NAFTA has been a successful kind of
international economic development in which jobs have been created in
Mexico and other Latin economies, thus eliminating the need for
impoverished Latin Americans to migrate to the U.S. for jobs. But if
you live on the border, you know that isn’t true.
We suggest that the Catastrophe Awareness Preparedness community might
take up this question. Why is the quality of life along the
Texas-Mexico border deteriorated so greatly in recent years? Why is it
that every time a politician arrives with a bag of free money to give
us our cost of living goes up?
Perhaps the greatest task for 2006 is identifying the degree to which
America’s political class is in fact the catastrophe of which we should
be aware in order to prepare ourselves.
We are constantly reminded of this syndrome by Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld. The year’s end brought many list-making exercises and
his specific failures in Iraq are now about a dozen published on
several lists. A feisty fellow, he often meets the press in the
Pentagon press room and engages in robust give and take. Before
Christmas he was answering questions about another operation in
northwest Iraq’s Al Anbar province on the Syrian border. To questions
which asked why the U.S. could not seal that border with Syria,
Secretary Rumsfeld burst out in some frustration and irritation.
Why were the reporters obsessing with sealing or securing the remote
Syria-Iraq border, he asked, we can’t secure our border with Mexico,
our neighbor.
Really. •
(Also
published by the Big Bend Sentinel of Marfa, Texas January 5, 2006.)
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