No[n]senseofplace

Interview: John Ross | 07/01/2010

Journalist John Ross presenting his book “El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City” at UC Berkeley.

John Ross is a New York born Mexico City based independent journalist, poet, writer, and one of the younger members of the Beat Generation.  His articles have appeared in publications such as the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Nation, CounterPunch, and La Jornada. He has published numerous books covering Mexico and Latin America. Following the path of other Beats, John first traveled to Mexico in the late 1950s and settled in the Meseta Purepecha in the state of Michoacán. When the FBI arrested him for failing to report for training in the U.S. army when he returned from Mexico, he became the first resister to be jailed for refusing to enlist, and fight in the Vietnam War.  After the September, 1985 earthquake destroyed large areas of Mexico City, killed thousands of its citizens, John returned to Mexico to cover the aftermath.  Angered by the government’s incompetent response to the disaster and the corruption of the authorities in charge of helping the victims, residents of the city took it upon themselves to organize rescue efforts and rebuild the city. John Ross became involved in these efforts and ever since, he has not been able to stay away from the city for very long. He has covered the most important political developments in Mexico for the past 25 years—form the electoral fraud of 1988 to the Zapatista uprising.

I first met John when I was a graduate student in Boston.  I ran into him months later blocks away from his home in downtown Mexico City and joined him for coffee at La Blanca.  I followed his reporting from Iraq when he became a human shield and along with other activists, tried to stop the U.S. invasion.  He was able to get out before the start of the U.S. led aggression and by coincidence I ran into him at La Bohemme in the San Francisco Mission District only a day after the U.S. began to drop bombs on Iraq and its citizens.  I tried to talk to him, but all he was able to say was, “they’re doing it, they are killing people and we aren’t doing anything about it!”  A few months later I moved to New York, and yet again by chance, I bumped into him in midtown Manhattan.

A few weeks ago when I was in Berkeley, I found out he was in town to present his book “El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City” and decided to talk to him about the year 1910, the bicentennial of the war for independence and the one hundredth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution.

John, It seems as if the worst possible scenario for 2010 in Mexico has become a reality. The US does not seem capable of absorbing Mexico’s reserve labor force, there is a consensus that oil is running out, we have a severe global financial crisis, a shrinking economy, short-sighted financial elites that refuse to make any meaningful concessions and, and locally grown yet globally effective and powerful criminal organizations at war with each other and with the federal government.  What is your assessment of the situation as it relates to the year 2010?

John Ross: We have to remember that the Mexican Revolution of 1910 just began on 1910, the social indicators were pretty much the same: massive unemployment, labor unrest, much as there is now.  There is massive unemployment now, the electricians are marching through the city, and there is a lot of social unrest.  And, very much like Porfirio Diaz who decided to take the entire social budget and invest it on things like fireworks, monuments, and a pair of pants for all the poor people to celebrate the first 100 years if independence, Calderon is doing the same thing. He’s building a monument on Reforma, which is the place Porfirio Diaz built up to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1810.  He [Calderon] is spending millions of dollars that the country does not have in order to mark the bicentennial and centennial. So, the conditions are somewhat the same.  We might have about 11 years worth of oil, after that, it’s all over.  But what it comes down to is that we need to have a social force and cohesion amongst the working classes in order to create change. Change just doesn’t happen simply because conditions are bad. Sometimes people are driven into a corner and they act out in a way that is not conducive to social change, maybe they internalize it, they might say I can’t get a job, I can’t support my family, I might go out and get drunk.  So it is not just about the objective forces, social conditions are such that the country is ripe for revolution, but that the subjective forces, the revolutionaries themselves, the social organizations of the left are not very consolidated.  There might have been a great outpouring after the elections of 2006 in support of Lopez Obrador, but I think we can see that has deflated considerably, which is perfectly natural. The Zapatistas came along sixteen years ago too, and it is perfectly natural for social movements to move to the background and other movements to replace them.  I think it is still to be defined how social movements will act with this important year of 2010 coming up. There are a lot of expectations for things to happen. My feelings are that we might see the beginning of a longer social revolution in Mexico, but we are not going to see a massive explosion in 2010.

If we jump two years into the future and we take a look at the possibilities for 2012, an electoral year that could result in the return of the PRI to governance with Peña Nieto as its presidential candidate, which some analysts view as the return of Salinas himself and the certain extension of the neoliberal model. What do you think of this possible scenario?

JR:  as we know 2012 is the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar, when the world ends and begins again, but it ends! So, that would kind of imply that neoliberalism will have to take some other form, and no doubt that it will. So 2012 is also loaded with all this cultural baggage, you might say, and a lot of people are looking to 2012, and not 2010. It appears as if Peña Nieto will be the candidate for the PRI. They are spending millions of dollars to make this happen. He has Televisa and TV Azteca supporting him, so you know, he has lined all that up. Whether the voting populace, (because lets’ face it, only about half of the population votes anyway), are ready to accept the PRI all over again, even as he only viable choice on the ballot, remains to be seen.  I frankly don’t think so.   I do think the PAN is over with, but my feelings are that the PRI will have a difficult time, and there is no guarantee that Peña Nieto will even be its candidate.  There is a lot of infighting going on, mostly bajo el agua, as they say.  But there are definitely currents within the PRI that do not want Peña Nieto to be the party’s candidate. So, maybe out reference would have to be 1994 when a PRI’s candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, or Salinas with hair as we used to call him, was assassinated in Tijuana. I do think that there are possibilities for that kind of electoral violence to occur given the strength of the drug cartels, and the violence which has been occurring all over the country.   I think there is no guarantee and we could see some really startling changes between then [2012] and now.  What we need is a candidate who can galvanize the type of support that Andrés Manuel López Obrador did in 2006, but this does not mean it has to be Andrés Manuel, I don’t know who this could be, I don’t have a figure in mind right now and does not even mean such a candidate has to come from the PRD, or from the left at all. So, we have to keep watching these events every day. The future is past in Mexico, as I often say. What happened before can happen all over again, and while we love this country, we have to say that we have had a very difficult time living with our rulers.