Don't Touch the "Tradiciones y Costumbres"

Catholics living on the edge of Toluca in San Cristóbal Huichochitlán are upset. It seems that somebody has been missing their history lessons on the Catholic Church in Mexico, and the priest in the area tried to mess with the customs and traditions of the congregation: He wanted to appoint his own fiscales and sacristanes. To put it in twenty-first century terms: Doh!

El Sol de Toluca has been covering the story since December, and it looked like the conflict might be coming to an end at the start of January. However, the priest with the backing of the bishop of Toluca has closed the church and moved to another chapel entirely.

So who cares? Well, aside from the folks in San Cristóbal Huichochitlán, this a great reminder of why the population of Mexico has a tradition of being Catholic and anti-clerical. In his EXCELLENT Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. (Stanford University Press, 1996), William B. Taylor looks at the delicate relationship between parishioners and priests as they jockey for power and control of resources and influence at the community level. There are a couple of things that will get a priest "rode out of town," and messing with the selection of lay positions is one of them. Acting as a fiscal or sacristan is not only a route to prestige in the community, access to funds and resources, and a way of participating in the sacred, but it also gives communities a sense of control of their worship that is so dominated by a heirarchical religion. In other words, you're screwing with their cosmos, man. By taking the final step of shutting down the very place of worship the Madre Iglesia is delivering a brutal slap to the community. I'll be curious to see how this plays out.

A final note, El Sol de Toluca refers to the Catholics involved as "congregants" while La Jornada says it got a letter from Otomies in San Cristobal. It looks like the congregations is trying to go after the church for violating the traditions and customs (quoting La Jornada) "sustentadas en la Constitución, en tratados internacionales y documentos episcopales."

Traffickers Use Quake to Nab Children

Sitting in my little East Texas hideaway this weekend I told my spouse: Five bucks says that slavers use the quake as a way to snatch kids from Haiti.

The Australian news service, ABC, published a note on Saturday that Children are already disappearing from hospitals and UNICEF is worried. How many have been snatched from shanties or camps and will be presumed dead as part of the quake?

Trafficking networks were springing into action immediately after the disaster and taking advantage of the weakness of local authorities and relief coordination "to kidnap children and get them out of the country".

A note for all of these human interest "adopt a kid from Haiti" stories that are flooding the press:

"We have documented around 15 cases of children disappearing from hospitals and not with their own family at the time," said UNICEF adviser Jean Luc Legrand.

"UNICEF has been working in Haiti for many years and we knew the problem with the trade of children in Haiti that existed already beforehand.

"Unfortunately, many of these trade networks have links with the international adoption market."

The agency said it had warned countries during the past week not to step up adoptions from Haiti in the immediate wake of the quake.

Haití, Francia y México

El Economista has an opinion piece reviewing the colonial past of Haiti and calling for France to cough up more support and cash. It made to final points - the first of which I expected, the second of which took me by surprise:

Dos apuntes conclusivos: a) Francia tiene una pesada responsabilidad histórica, que está lejos de asumir, para vergüenza propia; b) México ejercería un papel innovador y vital de liderazgo si promoviera una campaña para la restauración forestal y ecológica, y por tanto, de captura de carbono en Haití. Semarnat y Conafor pueden y deben hacerlo.

Arriba Mexico, hijos ... del arbol.

(Thanks to nicholson cartoons)

Religious Violence Continues in Chiapas: The Other Rights

Demonstrators in San Cristobal de las Casas entered their seventh day of protest for expulsions and violence done to them by local Catholics in Chiapas since mid January and earlier. Some families have been expelled from communities while others have been detained for failure to participate in Catholic community festivals.

Such violence is not new - we've seen Catholic on Protestant expulsions for twenty years now as well as pro-government Protestant on Catholic violence since the Zapatista revolution started. I once read in well regarded book by an even better regarded author of Mexican history that the local and the sacred had been replaced by the national and the liberal. Horse hockey. Evengelicals and Protestants in Chiapas, Luz del Mundo in Guadalajara, Nueva Jerusalen in Michoacan ... all of these show that the intersection of the sacred and the citizen are alive and well in Mexico and not relegated to a distant mid-nineteenth century past.

At any rate, while Mexico City frets about the rights of gays to marry, fundamental right of association and property are violated every day in the mas alla for religious reasons without much attention from DF. Most certainly the local and the sacred have not been relegated to the dustbin of Mexican history.

Think Shock Doctrine in Haiti

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine has been keeping up with attempts to capitalize on the quake in Haiti. From her site:

Readers of the The Shock Doctrine know that the Heritage Foundation has been one of the leading advocates of exploiting disasters to push through their unpopular pro-corporate policies. From this document, they're at it again, not even waiting one day to use the devastating earthquake in Haiti to push for their so-called reforms. The following quote was hastily yanked by the Heritage Foundation and replaced with a more diplomatic quote, but their first instinct is revealing:

"In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region."

When tectonic plates hand third-world nations lemons, capitalism makes lemonade.

Quakes Shake More than Plates in Lat Am History

Looting is being reported in the press as Haiti grinds on into another day of paralysis. Campus Progress has a nice article on how the "looting" is being played up in Haiti and makes a great comparison to New Orleans after Katrina.

Still, should the folks in Haiti start getting a little grumpy about the paralysis of the central government in the face of a disaster, it wouldn't be the first time. Citizens are willing to put up with a lot if basic security is provided (security in Foucaltian sense of being the neutral response to incidents that harm the population). When that basic security is absent, things can get sticky. A reminder of the three biggees for Latin America: The San Juan quake of 1944 catapulted Juan Domingo Peron in to the spotlight in Argentina; the 1972 quake in Nicaragua highlighted for the world the limits and depravity of the Somoza regime; the 1985 quake in D.F. not only showcased the corruption, limitations, and callusness of the PRI but it also created a plethora of neighborhood organizations that helped propel the capital into the hands of the PRD in later years.

Is Haiti in for a lot more pain beyond the immediate effects of the quake? Possible. On the other hand, what would any sort of shake up yield but to put different people in charge of total poverty?

Remembering Ancash: Peru, 1970

It is possible that Haiti will surpass the destruction of what until now has stood as the most devastating quake of the Western Hemisphere in modern times, the 1970 Ancash quake near Chimbote in Peru. At 7.7 (richter) the under coastal quake took out 80% of the structures in the affected area, killing an estimated 60,000 people and displacing perhaps half a million (but probably more) people. The quake also shook loose an 800 meter ice sheet on distant Mount Huascaran that in turn sent 80 million cubic meters of material crushing down on to the countryside below, and the city of Yungay disappeared (though later rebuilt, the original site of the city is a national cemetery). Huascaran is an angry spirit, having smashed the area in 1742 and 1962, making Yungay the dominate municipal area - essentially herding people into a central area and wiping them out in 1970. The Cristo (below) on the cemetery hill (along with the four palm trees below) were the only surviving features in the town of Yungay.

The settling of ground sediment caused massive destruction in Chimbote as well as flooding. Flooding was also made worse by the combination of settling and the avalanche: Rio Santa sent a 20 meter high wave down to coast for a distance of 150 kilometers, wiping out everything on its banks. Here are some pictures from the US Geological Survey of the area.