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Alyssa

Model at Mexican Presidential Debate Proves Our Politics Could Be Sillier, More Sexist

By Alyssa Rosenberg on May 9, 2012 at 8:36 am

Well, this makes American politics look positively sober-minded and feminist:

Julia Orayen has posed nude for Playboy and appeared barely dressed in other media, but she made her mark on Mexican minds Sunday night by carrying an urn filled with bits of paper determining the order that candidates would speak. Not that viewers were looking at the urn. She wore a tight, white dress with a wide, tear-drop cutout that revealed her ample decolletage. The image was splashed across newspaper front pages and websites by Monday.

“The best was the girl in white with the cleavage at the beginning,” tweeted former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, who is also a New York University professor.

Orayen’s name jockeyed for third and fourth place throughout the day under Twitter’s Mexico City trends, where a click revealed her previous work, including an almost-nude spread commemorating Mexican Independence Day in which she appears in minimal garb modeled on images of Mexican founding father Jose Maria Morelos.

Alfredo Figueroa, director of the Federal Electoral Institute responsible for organizing the debate, blamed the incident on a production associate hired by the institute to help with the debate. The institute later issued an apology to Mexican citizens and the candidates for the woman’s dress.

The problem here isn’t really the dress, or the fact that Julia Orayen has posed nude. It’s that the debate organizers thought that what the event really needed was a hot female presenter to kick things off. I can’t imagine it ever crossed their minds to hire a man for this position—because of course we need reminders that often in politics, men are supposed to be the main characters while women are their pretty supporting players—or that they specified professional attire for the presenter. I’d be curious as to what candidate Josefina Eugenia Vázquez Mota, the lone female candidate in the race, thought of the fact that some of her rivals apparently went all goggly-eyed when Orayen came on stage. They, and Figueroa shouldn’t apologize for Orayen’s dress. They should apologize for turning a serious process into a stupid, sexist spectacle.

Climate Progress

Mexico Sets Legally Binding Carbon Reduction Targets

By Climate Guest Blogger on May 3, 2012 at 9:35 am

Felipe Calderón stands in front of a wind farm in Mexico.

by Jeffrey Cavanagh

Since Mexico’s legislative body passed sweeping climate change legislation on April 19, Mexico joins the UK as the only two countries in the world with legally binding emissions goals to combat climate change.

The new law will reduce the country’s carbon emissions, end fossil fuel subsidies, and establish a voluntary carbon trading market. This law builds on Mexico’s previous commitments to action on climate change, and reflects on the country’s green leadership on the international stage it prepares to host the upcoming G20 leaders’ summit in June.

Adrián Fernández, a consultant for the Latin American Initiative and former President of the National Ecology Institute, recently discussed the importance of Mexico’s new climate change law during a briefing 2012 by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington DC:

[Mexico] now has a framework that allows governments at national and local levels to set aside budgets with clear earmarks towards climate change, and to create new investments for climate mitigation and adaptation … pushing [Mexico] into the spotlight and, under international scrutiny, [Mexico] will be held accountable to its people and the international community.

After several years of debate and revision, the bill passed Mexico’s lower house on April 12, with a vote of 128 for and 10 against. Mexico’s Senate unanimously passed the legislation on April 19, and President Felipe Calderon, who has championed immediate action to stop global warming, is expected to sign the bill into law soon.

As President Calderon prepares to host the next G20 summit in June, his administration will make climate change and sustainable development “priorities” during the meeting under a broad Green Growth theme. With 75 percent of the world’s GDP, the G20 is responsible for 75 percent of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Bringing together finance ministers from these countries is essential for putting sustainability at the core of economic recovery and for figuring out how to mobilize significant resources for international climate finance.

Read more

Justice

More Mexicans Are Now Leaving The U.S. Than Entering

By Josh Israel on Apr 24, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Earlier this month, ThinkProgress reported that immigration from Mexico into the United States reached a “net zero” level. Yet a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center reveals that more Mexicans appear to be leaving the United States for Mexico than are leaving Mexico for the U.S.A for the first time since the Great Depression.

The report notes several factors that are likely behind the change including tighter borders, including a weakened U.S. economy and a rise in deportations. But most interesting are two factors that may indicate that the trend may be lasting. First, the birthrate in Mexico has dropped. Between 1960 and 2009, the average Mexican woman went from having nine children to just two. As such the Mexican population has dropped. Second, the Mexican economy has improved. With a relatively strong economy, there is less incentive for citizens to emigrate.

For years, the U.S. immigration debate has been built around an assumption that there are large numbers of Mexican nationals trying to move into the U.S. — legally and illegally. This report suggests that this assumption may need to be re-evaluated. As Princeton Professor Douglas Massey, who co-directs the Mexican Migration Project, told the Washington Post, “I think the massive boom in Mexican immigration is over and I don’t think it will ever return to the numbers we saw in the 1990s and 2000s.”

Justice

Number Of Undocumented Immigrants From Mexico Who Are Entering and Leaving U.S. Hits Net Zero

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Apr 9, 2012 at 1:00 pm

According to Mexican census data, 1 million undocumented immigrants returned to Mexico from the U.S. between 2005 and 2010 — more than three times the number who said they had returned from 2000 to 2004. The majority of these immigrants are returning to their homes for good, leading to a massive shift in Mexico, which has relied on billions in remittances as a form of social welfare. And the changing immigration patterns has led to “net zero” migration:

At the macroeconomic level, Douglas Massey, founder of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University, has documented what he calls “net zero” migration. The population of undocumented immigrants in the US fell from 12 million to approximately 11 million during the height of the financial crisis (2008-09), he says. And since then, Mexicans without documents aren’t migrating at rates to replace the loss, creating a net zero balance for the first time in 50 years.

After analyzing census data and household surveys, Agustin Escobar, a demographer at the Center for Research in Social Anthropology in Guadalajara, Mexico, found that migrants leaving Mexico dropped from more than 1 million in 2005 to 368,000 in 2010.

The shift began as a result of the weak U.S. economy, but experts say anti-immigrant state laws, tougher U.S. border enforcement, and border violence are contributing factors as well.

Alyssa

Oliver Stone’s ‘Savages’ and the Rise of the Cartels

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 6, 2012 at 11:37 am

With Savages, a movie about a pair of pot growers and their shared girlfriend, who gets herself kidnapped by goons attached to queenpin Salma Hayek, Oliver Stone’s become the latest director to cast Mexican drug cartels as the villains in a flashy action movie:

Navy SEALs movie Act of Valor portrayed a tunnel system run by Mexican cartel leaders as a valuable aid to al Qaeda. Tony Scott’s working on Narco Sub, a movie about the submersibles the cartels used in smuggling operations. Breaking Bad‘s most recent season came up with a novel, moving, bloody twist on a cartel story, but it relied heavily on the visuals of sparkling pools, heavy gold jewelry, hot girls and hotter cars to set the scene. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to come up with a novel movie villain, or wanting to tap into new and different current of global anxiety. But there’s something weird about the assumptions of all of these movies that the most interesting stories you could tell about the cartels involve their impact on individual Americans rather than on Mexican society. It’s almost like there are compelling stories you could tell about Mexican characters that wouldn’t overstate the impact of drugs in the United States.

Justice

Quadriplegic Undocumented Immigrant Dies In Mexico After Being Deported From His Hospital Bed

By Marie Diamond on Jan 6, 2012 at 9:50 am

Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, 21, died in Mexico after being deported last year

In August 2010, Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, an undocumented construction worker in Chicago, fell 20 feet off a building while on the job and was paralyzed from the neck down. Unable to pay his own medical expenses, he was deported back to Mexico on December 22, 2010.

But he never made it home. Instead, he was left to languish at a small Mexican hospital that was unequipped to handle his needs. UPI reports that Ojeda died on New Year’s Day:

A young man returned to Mexico by a Chicago-area hospital after a construction injury that paralyzed him from the neck down has died, officials say.

Advocates say Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, 21, spent months in a small hospital in Mexico that did not have the facilities to care for a quadriplegic, the Chicago Tribune reported. [...]

“He never even made it to his home,” said Jesus Vargas, a friend in Chicago. “He was always in the hospital stuck to the machine that helped him breathe.”

Ojeda, who was working illegally in the United States, was treated at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Ill., after a 20-foot fall paralyzed him. The hospital transferred him to Mexico three days before Christmas in 2010.

Ojeda’s deportation followed a heated battle between the hospital and immigration advocates. He was transferred to a Mexican hospital in an air ambulance despite protests from Ojeda and his family that the move would jeopardize his health.

In light of his death, the Chicago hospital that treated him has said it will reexamine its policies for treating international patients.

Ojeda told the Chicago Tribune last February that he feared returning to Mexico because he “need[ed] a lot of things they don’t have.” Tragically, his fears turned out to be all too real.

Justice

Santorum Says Mass Deportation Isn’t So Bad: ‘We’re Not Sending Them To Any Kind Of Difficult Country’

By Marie Diamond on Dec 1, 2011 at 3:20 pm

Being deported is like taking a vacation in Cancun, basically.

ThinkProgress has been reporting on how GOP contenders have practically been tripping over each other to offer the harshest, most costly proposal for dealing with undocumented immigrants. Former Sen. Rick Santorum (PA) joined in the chest-thumping yesterday on Fox News, opposing the idea that undocumented immigrants who have been here for decades should have any path to reside here legally or apply for citizenship. Santorum said there shouldn’t even be consideration for immigrants who have family members living in the U.S. legally.

He “doesn’t want to break up families,” he said, but deportation isn’t so bad because “we’re not sending them to any kind of difficult country”:

SANTORUM: Yeah I feel bad, I don’t like to break up families, but you know the family can go back. We’re not sending them to Siberia. We’re not sending them to any kind of, you know, difficult country. They’re going to Mexico, which is a great country, a nice country. And they can go back like every other Mexican that wants to come to America and come here legally.

Watch it:

Santorum may think that being deported to Mexico is akin to taking a permanent vacation in Cancun, but most immigrants find it a harrowing experience. Immigrants, some of whom have lived in the U.S. since childhood, are forcibly removed from their families and sent to a place where they often have no remaining connections, no relatives, and no housing or job prospects.

In search of a better life and more economic opportunity, approximately 400,000 migrants go through Mexico each year to reach the United States. Nearly half the Mexican population, or 52 million people, live in poverty, 11.7 million of them in extreme poverty. Much of the population lacks access to food, clean water, education, and health care.

Some immigrants who come to the U.S. are also refugees who are too scared of being deported or intimidated by the difficult legal process to apply for asylum. The U.S. asylum system has been particularly unmerciful for people running from Central American gangs — despite a surge in gang-related claims, their petitions are rarely granted. Many immigrants have been killed by gangs after being deported, proving their lives really were at risk — but too late.

NEWS FLASH

Hour One Of Climate Reality: Mexico City | The Climate Reality Project’s 24 Hours of Reality begins in Mexico City, one of the world’s largest megacities. The city of 20 million residents is facing a water crunch from two directions — increasing demand is drying out aquifers, causing rapid sinking of as much as a foot-and-a-half a year. Meanwhile, extreme precipitation fueled by greenhouse pollution is on the rise, causing killer floods that overwhelm the city’s sewer systems. The dangerous present and future for the largest and oldest city in North America is being presented in Spanish by Gerardo Pandal, the area manager for renewable energy at Guascor de México.

Highlights:

Related Posts

By Brad Johnson on Sep 14, 2011 at 7:55 pm

Alyssa

Beauty Queen And Border Crossings

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 12, 2011 at 4:08 pm

This trailer for Miss Bala makes the movie look pretty good, and also helps me put my finger on another thing that irritated me about Colombiana that I couldn’t articulate at the time:

Colombiana, despite ostensibly being a drug war movie, has absolutely nothing new to say about the relationship of American governmental organizations to drug trafficking, and nothing at all to say about the roles of cartels in day-to-day life in the countries where they operate. Miss Bala, by contrast, is set in Tijuana, and appears to have some sense (even if it is not journalism) of what it’s like to be in a place where the integrity of governmental organizations is not assured.

William Finnegan’s done amazing reporting for the New Yorker over the last couple of years in particular about things like the efforts to reclaim control of and reform Tijuana’s police force (its radio frequencies were hijacked by narcotraficantes, among other things) and by extension, the city’s streets; and the infiltration of cartels into a wide range of aspects of life and institutions, both in government and business, in Michoacán, and I’ve always wondered why we don’t have more good action movies that reflect and explore that reality, or more movies about the state of Mexico at all. The movies Mexico’s sent to the Academy Awards to compete in the Foreign Language Film category in recent year have a tendency to be either personal stories, or set in Spain: Silent Light and El crimen del padre Amaro fall into the first category; Biutiful, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Aro Tolbukhin; Al otro lado is the only one of these movies to address immigration. I’m not saying Mexican filmmakers have to make movies about the state of Mexican society, or that Mexico is obligated to put such movies in Oscar contention, but I do think it would be good for Americans to see movies that give them a sense of what’s going on one country over.

If our war on terror is abstract, Mexico’s war on drugs is dreadfully concrete, and much closer to our borders than our fights in Iraq and Afghanistan: between 2006 and 2010, it killed 23,000 people. Our movies about why people might want to come here and why we should let them haven’t done particularly well recently. Chris Weitz may be pushing his immigration movie A Better Life hard for Academy Awards contention, but it only made $1.8 million at the box office. Spanglish‘s $42 million domestic gross in 2004 almost certainly had more to do with Adam Sandler’s presence in the movie than any interest in the heartwarming immigration story. If filmmakers want Americans to be sympathetic to immigrants to the United States, illegal and otherwise, maybe they need to tell more stories about what people are coming from, rather than what they’re coming to.

Health

Perry Proposed A Bi-National Health Insurance Plan With Mexico In 2001

By Marie Diamond on Sep 1, 2011 at 10:00 am

Gov. Perry with then-Mexican President Vincente Fox.

The ghosts of Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) more moderate past have come back to haunt him in recent days, particularly when it comes to health care.

In 2001 at a border summit in south Texas, Perry spoke optimistically about the prospects for a “bi-national health insurance” program that would cover both U.S. and Mexican residents along the border. He also praised the Texas legislature’s bill to increase funding for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Given that Perry now considers Medicaid to be unconstitutional, the speech reads like it comes from another world — or an entirely different person:

There are other challenges that require a unified approach, especially in the area of health care. [...] I urged legislators to pass a telemedicine pilot program that will enable, through technology, a sick border resident of limited financial means to receive care from a specialist hundreds of miles away.

But the effort to combat disease and illness requires greater cooperative efforts between our two nations. It is a simple truth that disease knows no boundaries. [...] We have much to gain if we work together to expand preventative care, and treat maladies unique to this region.

Legislation authored by border legislators Pat Haggerty and Eddie Lucio establishes an important study that will look at the feasibility of bi-national health insurance. This study recognizes that the Mexican and U.S. sides of the border compose one region, and we must address health care problems throughout that region. That’s why I am also excited that Texas Secretary of State Henry Cuellar is working on an initiative that could extend the benefits of telemedicine to individuals living on the Mexican side of the border.

In the speech, Perry also extols the need for more preventative medicine and brags about how the legislature “expanded access to Medicaid for more low-income children” and increased Medicaid funding by $4 billion. His past praise for a “unified,” transnational health care program is a stark contrast with the view he expresses in his recent book Fed Up, where he posits that the Constitution forbids a “federally operated program of pensions” and “a federally operated program of health care.”

The remarks paint a refreshing picture of an enlightened, compassionate Perry who is informed about the benefits of preventative health care and Medicaid and has sympathy for poor border residents and undocumented immigrants.

The Perry campaign is, predictably, trying to downplay the speech. Campaign spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger tried to distance Perry from the proposal, saying, “A bill was passed by the Legislature that authorized a study to look into this issue, which ultimately concluded there were numerous barriers to accomplishing that idea, and the Legislature took no further action on this concept.”

Perry has also faced scrutiny this week for a 1993 letter he wrote as Texas Agricultural Commissioner praising then-First Lady Hillary Clinton for her efforts to reform the health care system. That legislation was brought down by mass GOP opposition and “Hillarycare” is still derided by conservatives as the precursor to “Obamacare.”

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