BERKELEY REVIEW OF Latin American...

BERKELEY REVIEW OF

Latin American StudiesU N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A , B E R K E L E Y

SPRING 2007

BERKELEY REVIEW OF

Latin American StudiesU N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A , B E R K E L E Y

U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum U.S.–Mexico Futures ForumChile Heads RightChile Heads Right

FALL 2009 – WINTER 2010

The Making of a MaestroThe Making of a Maestro

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Table of Contents


FALL 2009 – WINTER 2010Comment Harley Shaiken 1

Chile Heads Right Kirsten Sehnbruch 2

A Tale of Two Economies Brian Palmer-Rubin 9

Peering Behind the Curtain Jude Joffe-Block and Brian Palmer-Rubin 14

Headwinds for Climate Change Policy Christopher M. Jones 18

The Making of a Maestro Lawrence Rinder Interviews Fernando Botero 22

Silver or Lead: Confronting the Business of Violence Wendy Muse Sinek 31

The Bachelet Bounce Kirsten Sehnbruch 38

Culture and Politics in the Honduran Coup Rosemary Joyce 42

Presumed Guilty: Based on an Untrue Story Mary Ellen Sanger 48

“La noche está estrellada”“La noche está estrellada” Photo from El Paranal, Chile 52

The Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies is published by the Center for Latin American Studies, 2334 Bowditch Street, Berkeley, CA 94720.

Chair

Harley Shaiken

Acting Vice Chair

Dionicia RamosEditor and Publications Coordinator

Jean SpencerProgram Coordinator

Beth PerryDesign and Layout

Greg Louden

Special thanks to former CLAS staff members Sara E. Lamson, Jacqueline Sullivan and Matt Werner.Contributing Editor: Deborah Meacham

Additional thanks to: Carla Aguirre, Lucinda Barnes, Dena Beard, Lisa Calden, Sean Carson, Genevieve Cottraux, Daniella Chudler, Vanessa Gatihi, Sharon Gibbons, Lupe Gomez-Downing, Roberto Hernández, Cristina Lleras Figueroa, Tim Lynch, Layda Negrete, Jessica Occhialini, Ernesto Ottone, Rosa Ovshinsky, Stan Ovshinsky, Michael Prete, Lawrence Rinder, Annie Rochfort, Freya Saito, Massimo Tarenghi, Breidi Truscott and Susan Urrutia.

Contributing Photographers: Marceloa Agost, Julie Akers, Ed Carsi, Sandra Cuffe, Jeroen Elfferfich, Will Klinger, Anirudh Koul, mañsk, Matty Nematollahi, Alex E. Proimos, Peg Skorpinski, Jonathan Tobin, Eneas De Troya, Rob Verhoeven and Lisa de Vreede.

Front cover: Street scene around La Fuente de los Faroles, Zacatecas. Photo by Eneas De Troya.

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

1Fall 2009 – Winter 2010

We go to press with this Review in the aftermath of

two devastating earthquakes. The quake in Haiti was a

natural disaster that became a social catastrophe, leaving

hundreds of thousands dead and displaced and crippling

the economy. The unusually strong terremoto in Chile —

8.8 on the moment magnitude scale — resulted in hundreds

of dead and severe economic disruption. The disasters saw

an outpouring of aid from throughout the Americas, but

the grueling challenge of rebuilding lies ahead for both

countries. We plan to look at the context of the disasters

and the options for the future in upcoming Reviews.

We begin with a political upheaval: the end of two

decades of center-left governance in Chile and the election

of Sebastián Piñera, a candidate of the right. While the

Piñera victory was hardly a surprise, the new president

faces the tasks of reconstruction on top of the challenge of

constituting a new government. Kirsten Sehnbruch lays out

the possibilities in “Chile Heads Right.” Sehnbruch, a senior

fellow at CLAS and now a professor of Public Policy at the

Universidad de Chile, also examines the historic legacy of

the Bachelet presidency in this edition.

This Review also refl ects on the many challenges

facing Mexico and the United States. Four articles examine

the bilateral relationship from different angles, including:

the economic collapse and its impact on both countries;

the growing importance of issues of transparency and

accountability; energy and the environment; and the

horrifi c escalation of violence associated with the drug

wars. All of these issues were part of the discussion at the

U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum, organized by CLAS and

ITAM and held at Berkeley in the fall of 2009.

Rosemary Joyce, a UC Berkeley Anthropology

professor, writes about “Culture and Politics in the

Honduran Coup.” Joyce has done path-breaking

anthropological research in Honduras for three decades

and brings unusual depth and cultural understanding to

this look at a contemporary political disaster.

Finally, we present a conversation between Fernando

Botero and Lawrence Rinder, director of the Berkeley Art

Museum, about the world-renowned artist’s life and work.

Botero was in Berkeley to open an exhibit showing 60 of

his extraordinary Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings

that he has donated to UC Berkeley. Chancellor Robert J.

Birgeneau presented him with the Chancellor’s Citation,

one of the university’s highest awards.

— Harley Shaiken

Comment

Harley Shaiken with members of the U.S.-Mexico Futures Forum walking across the Berkeley campus, fall 2009.

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2 Article Title

Chileans go to the polls.Chileans go to the polls.Photo by Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty Images.Photo by Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty Images.



On January 19, 2010, two decades of government

by the Concertación, Chile’s center-left coalition,

came to an end. The triumphant winner of the

election, Sebastián Piñera, received the congratulations

of the outgoing president, Michelle Bachelet, and the

defeated Concertación candidate, Eduardo Frei, while his

supporters took to the streets to celebrate, honking the

horns of their shiny SUVs. The pelolais, upper-class girls

with glossy hair and high heels, got lost downtown near

Plaza Italia because they had never before ventured beyond

the confi nes of Santiago’s four high-income districts.

More disconcertingly, portraits of Chile’s former dictator,

Augusto Pinochet, appeared from nowhere to line the

streets in some wealthy areas of town.

It was a rare display of upper-class celebration in a city

that continues to be marked by the stark contrast between

a few shiny skyscrapers and the humble homes of the

majority of its population. These unusual images prompt

the question: How did a left-of-center coalition that has

made extraordinary progress in every policy area lose an

election, even as its extremely popular outgoing president

clocked up record approval ratings?

The result of this election was by no means a

foregone conclusion, despite the poor performance of

Chile Heads Right by Kirsten Sehnbruch

ELECTION 2010

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Sebastián Piñera demonstrates his soccer skills.

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4

the Concertación’s candidate, Eduardo Frei, in the first

round. In fact, considering that the coalition has spent

the last 20 years in government, the election result was

impressive: rather than a resounding victory for the

right, Piñera won the presidency by a 3 percent margin

and did not obtain the majority he needed in both houses

of Congress to prevent the Concertación from being able

to block legislation.

Still, the Concertación lost the presidency.

Four immediate reasons spring to mind. First, 20 years

in offi ce, no matter how well executed, is a long time for

any government. Tired of seeing the same faces on TV

for the last two decades (and even longer if we consider

the Concertación’s role as opposition to the Pinochet

dictatorship), the Chilean electorate wanted change. During

the last 20 years, Chile has evolved beyond recognition,

as have the aspirations of its population. Twenty years

ago, the main issue was poverty. Now, Chileans are more

concerned with the country’s persistently high levels of

inequality and access to higher education and health care.

The irony of the situation is that the Concertación changed

Chile faster than it adapted to that change itself.

The ad-hoc candidacy of a relatively unknown

congressman, Marco Enríquez-Ominami, is a testimony

to how fed up Chileans have become with traditional

politics. Formerly a member of the Socialist party,

Enríquez-Ominami broke with the Concertación to run as

an independent, garnering an astonishing 20.1 percent of

the vote in the fi rst round of the presidential elections. His

candidacy, which came about due to a lack of democratic

decision-making within the Concertación, was the second

factor contributing to the coalition’s defeat: Enríquez-

Ominami split the vote in the fi rst round of the elections

and then failed to give Frei his wholehearted support in the

second round.

The third problem lay with the Concertación’s

candidate. In a year when the electorate demanded change,

Eduardo Frei was a throwback. Not only had he previously

served as president (1994-2000), he is also the son of a

former president. The drawbacks of Frei’s association with

the past were compounded by his lack of personal pizzazz.

In a democracy in which the personalities of presidents

increasingly decide election results, the reliable, competent,

but nevertheless lackluster fi gure of Frei did little to pull in

votes for the Concertación.

While a candidate with a stronger personality would

undoubtedly have made a difference in this election, the

fourth reason for the Concertación’s loss is probably the

Chile Heads Right

Marco Enríquez-Ominami on the campaign trail.

Photo courtesy of Marco Enríquez-O

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most critical. Chile’s binominal election system, in which

two candidates from each competing coalition stand in

each district, almost automatically guarantees the victory

of at least one candidate from the governing and one from

the opposition coalition in every electoral district. This

leads to a system of pre-negotiated democracy, in which

who wins depends more on which candidate is set to

compete against which coalition partner than on any real

competition between political coalitions. The resultant

jockeying for candidacy strains the unity of the coalition.

Moreover, the inertia that this system generates prevents

the emergence of younger politicians: candidacies are

awarded by party elders, rather than being the result of

any organic grassroots process.

This system of negotiated democracy has undoubtedly

led to cronyism and a degree of clientelism within the

coalitions, even though actual corruption rates in Chile

remain very low. This phenomenon has been more visible

to the electorate in the case of the Concertación because

these party negotiations have been replicated within the

governing administration, leading to the impression that

offi ces are fi lled according to political connections rather

than merit.

In addition, this system prevents political renewal, as it

is diffi cult for outsiders to break into party negotiations or to

set up independent candidacies. It also explains why political

parties in Chile are so poorly regarded by the electorate and

magnifi es why 20 years in offi ce, an extraordinary feat in

itself, left voters looking for change.

The big question now is whether Sebastián Piñera will

really be able to institute the changes he promised in the

short four-year presidential term, which does not allow for

consecutive reelections. These promises include recovering

economic growth rates of 6 percent per annum, generating

one million decent jobs, privatizing a portion of the state

copper company, reforming the government, reducing

crime and taking a tougher judicial approach to criminals.

Since Piñera does not have a clear majority in either

house of Congress, the Concertación could mount a strong

opposition to any policies it does not favor. Furthermore,

Piñera will have to face the difficulty of balancing the

interests within his coalition. His own party, Renovación >>

Eduardo Frei speaks to supporters.

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6 Chile Heads Right

Nacional (National Renewal, RN), has more senators,

but his coalition partner, the Unión Democrática

Independiente (Independent Democratic Union, UDI)

has twice as many deputies and clearly expects to play

an important role in his government. Therefore, the

first dilemma Piñera will face is how to balance these

pressures, particularly since many of the UDI’s members

are so closely linked to the former dictator, Augusto

Pinochet. The question of whether Piñera would include

politicians in his administration who had also participated

in Pinochet’s government caused a lot of tension during

the final days before the presidential election. Although

Piñera knows that any association with the dictatorship

is politically dangerous, he also has to keep his coalition

partners happy. Just as presidents Lagos and Bachelet

had to prove that the left is no longer the left of Salvador

Allende, Piñera has to prove that the right is no longer the

right of Augusto Pinochet.

Piñera’s cabinet nominations show that he is well aware

of these issues. Out of a cabinet of 22 ministers, Piñera

only picked eight from his coalition parties. One minister,

Jaime Ravinet, is a long-standing Christian Democrat

and a former minister in the Lagos administration.

The remaining 13 ministers are not party militants but

independent technocrats. By selecting a cabinet with

such a large number of independent ministers, Piñera is

sending several clear signals: fi rst, he is relegating political

parties to a position of secondary importance. Second,

he is demonstrating that he has selected his ministers for

their qualifi cations and levels of expertise rather than to

satisfy party quotas. Third, his nominations distance his

government from the Pinochet dictatorship and force

the parties that back him to follow this shift towards the

political center. Fourth, the fact that most of the new

ministers come from high-level management positions

in the private sector demonstrates Piñera’s desire to

introduce a change of attitude and greater effi ciency into

Chile’s public sector. Fifth, governing with members of

the opposition in key ministerial positions demonstrates

Piñera’s desire to establish a government of national unity,

a new concept in Chilean politics, where the lines between

government and opposition have never yet been crossed.

Piñera supporters celebrate victory.

Photo by Lisa de Vreede.



So far, Piñera’s strategy constitutes a high-risk

political gamble. As yet, it is too early to say whether he

will win or lose. Appointing cabinet ministers without

political experience or party endorsement could backfire.

The same goes for appointing ministers from the private

sector who have obvious conf licts of interest between

their new and their old positions. Again, this is untested

ground for Chile’s post-transition democracy, which will

have to find transparent mechanisms for managing these

conf licts of interest.

It is clear that Piñera is betting on the unity and

political discipline of his coalition, which will be driven by

a desire to win the 2014 election and thus defi nitively break

the Concertación’s stranglehold on power. If his cabinet

functions smoothly and successfully, this unity is likely

to hold. Problems could arise if the new cabinet makes

mistakes or is faced with unexpected popular unrest.

Chile’s immediate political future will also depend

to a significant extent on the role of President Bachelet,

who could potentially stand for reelection in 2014. While

her overwhelming approval ratings make her a potential

candidate, the clamor for generational change, together

with the lack of political unity in a Concertación that

needs to regroup and rethink, could have an impact on

the race.

In any case, the 2014 elections will be very different

from past elections: an electoral reform is likely to be

passed that will no longer require people to register to vote.

Registration will become automatic while the actual voting

will become voluntary. At present, voters are not obliged to

register, and many choose not to, but once they do, it is

mandatory for them to vote in every subsequent election

or they may be fi ned. This means that young people, who

since 1990 have generally not bothered to register to vote,

will be able to do so without going through the previously

required administrative steps. It also means that many

of those who currently get out and vote may stay home.

These changes will have an unpredictable impact on voting

patterns, so in 2014 anything could happen.

Kirsten Sehnbruch is a professor of Public Policy at the Instituto de Asuntos Publicos, Universidad de Chile.

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The new president faces unforeseen challenges: fi shing boats cast ashore by a tsunami, February 2010.


8

The U.S.–Mexico The U.S.–Mexico Futures ForumFutures Forum

A project of CLAS and ITAMA project of CLAS and ITAMSponsored by the Hewlett Foundation Sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation

The Diana fountain, Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City.(Photo by Anirudh Koul.)



The Great Recession has underscored how closely

the economic fates of Mexico and the United

States are intertwined, with oil, immigration

and manufacturing playing lead roles in this tale of two

economies. Mexico shares nearly 2,000 miles of border

with its northern neighbor, and a substantial portion of

the country’s income is made up of oil and manufacturing

exports to the United States and remittance checks sent

home by workers who have immigrated to the world’s

largest economy. Mexico inevitably experiences crippling

shock waves when the U.S. economy falters.

The current economic downturn is no exception.

Mexico’s economy has been the hardest hit in Latin

America; its GDP dropped 10 percent from the second

quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009. Furthermore,

the crisis has uncovered serious structural fl aws in both

countries’ economies that are likely to inhibit a full recovery,

according to the panelists who led a discussion on the

Global Economic Crisis at the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum.

Presenters included Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy

at UC Berkeley; J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics

at UC Berkeley; and Isaac Katz, Professor of Economics at

the Instituto Tecnólogico Autónomo de México (ITAM).

Although much attention has been paid in congressional

hearings and in the media to the proximate causes of the

crisis in the U.S. — subprime lending and overreach by

banks — careful analysis reveals root causes that extend at

least as far back as the Reagan administration. Reich and

DeLong identifi ed the regressive tax reforms of the 1980s

and the Federal Reserve Bank’s hands-off approach to

overseeing fi nancial institutions as factors that precipitated

the downturn. The two experts made the case that the U.S.

A Tale of Two Economiesby Brian Palmer-Rubin

U.S.– MEXICO FUTURES FORUMForeclosure sign in Salton City, California.

Photo by Jeroen Elfferfi ch.

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10 A Tale of Two Economies

economy, once lauded as the pinnacle of capitalism, faces

serious structural problems.

Most dire is the concentration of wealth in recent

decades, which has led to anemic demand. Because those

with lower incomes spend a higher percentage of their

earnings, Reich explained, the concentration of income at

the top has hindered consumption. He also posited that

growing inequality played a substantial role in the subprime

mortgage crisis, as middle-class Americans accumulated

unmanageable levels of debt in response to rising housing

prices and stagnant wages.

The hubris of the Federal Reserve Bank regarding its

ability to avert large-scale crises is also to blame for the

current situation, DeLong maintained. After more than

half a century without a severe economic crisis in the U.S.,

the Fed under Chairman Alan Greenspan (1987-2006)

endorsed fi nancial deregulation, confi dent in the stability

of self-regulating fi nancial markets. This optimism carried

over into the term of Ben Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor.

As a result of this miscalculation, said DeLong, the Fed did

not intervene quickly enough and did not have the right

tools to take effective action when important fi nancial

institutions, such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and

Merrill Lynch, began to fail.

While many experts predict that the U.S. economy will

stabilize by 2010, formally ending the current recession,

Reich and DeLong did not see great prospects for a

boost in the level of aggregate demand. For Mexico, this

spells bad news. Though demand for oil, Mexico’s most

important export, is expected to rebound, one-fi fth of

Mexico’s economy is based on manufacturing exports to

the U.S., a less-promising sector. Since the 1980s, Mexico

has implemented an export-led growth model for economic

development. As a result, over the past 20 years, the share

of foreign trade has doubled, from about one-third of GDP

to roughly two-thirds, according to Reich. It follows that

low demand north of the border would lead to declining

employment and income south of the border. In Reich’s

words, “Mexico is sleeping with an elephant, and the

elephant is very sick.”

Even more disconcerting, there is reason to doubt that

economic recuperation in the U.S. will be paralleled in Mexico.

With stubbornly low levels of demand among American

consumers, Mexico’s industrial sector is unlikely to lead

the way to economic recovery, said DeLong. Moreover, the

most viable potential “leading sectors” in generating extra

demand in the United States — government health care and

import-substitution manufacturing — offer little in the way

of support for Mexican production. According to several

indicators — GDP, employment, government revenue —

Mexico has been the Latin American country hardest hit by

the economic crisis. Katz offered two explanations for the

Declining demand from the United States has affected Mexico’s export industry.

Photo by Jonathan Tobin.



Guillermo Ortiz, president of the Bank of Mexico, with a graph of his country’s GDP growth over the last few years.

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severe impact south of the Rio Grande. First, he echoed Reich

and DeLong in noting that Mexico is the country whose

economy is most closely linked to the U.S. through trade and

remittances. Second, Katz argued that Mexico’s economy has

a particularly ineffi cient incentive structure, which stunts

research and development and hinders competition.

Two key economic sectors are illustrative of the

ineffi ciencies in the Mexican market system. First,

Pemex, the state-owned oil company, is stuck with aging

infrastructure and limited resources for investment, as its

coffers are regularly raided by the federal government to pay

for social programs. Second, lenient competition policy for

public utilities has led to infl ated prices and spotty service,

hampering the growth of all business sectors that rely on

those services. Such ineffi ciencies not only stunt economic

growth but also lead to smaller government budgets, since

lower business revenue yields lower tax payments.

Given the Mexican government’s limited funds,

President Felipe Calderón’s administration has chosen to

stay the course, continuing to emphasize fi scal austerity, as it

did prior to the crisis, rather than implementing a stimulus

package. Most other Latin American countries have taken

the same approach. Yet practically all countries in the region,

aside from Mexico, are navigating the turbulent times with

a remarkable level of stability.

Chile’s handling of the crisis serves as a positive model.

Blessed with a thriving copper mining industry, the South

American country’s export markets fl ourished in the years

preceding the crisis as copper prices reached an all-time

high. Rather than spending all its copper tax revenue right

away, however, the Chilean government invested a large

portion of these funds in a special account to help the

country withstand future downturns. This strategy seems

incredibly prescient today, as Chile has been able to put in

place a $4 billion stimulus package (2.8 percent of GDP)

without going into debt. Chile is providing evidence to

counter the long-held assumption that reliance on natural

resources leads to profl igate spending.

In contrast, Mexico’s investment rating with agencies

such as Standard and Poor’s is likely to decline if the

country does not resolve its budget imbalance in the

coming months. A lower rating would further intensify

Mexico’s economic woes by discouraging much-needed

foreign investment. Given that Mexico’s oil fields, from

which the government derives one-third of its revenue,

are in serious decline, the most obvious option for

avoiding future budget deficits is to raise the income tax,

Katz argued. He suggested a jump from its current level

of about 10 percent of GDP to roughly 17 percent. Such a

reform poses immense political challenges, however, and


12 A Tale of Two Economies

prospects for tax reform in the near

future are low.

More so than in other Latin

American countries, economic down-

turns in Mexico are exacerbated

by emigration. A lack of attractive

job opportunities induces young

Mexicans — both skilled and unskilled

— to cast their fate as immigrants

in the U.S., leading to a shortage of

qualifi ed workers for new jobs in

Mexico, as well as subpar tax receipts

and consumption. Katz maintained

that formal Mexican employment

would have to grow to offer potential

migrants better alternatives than

moving across the border, but the trend

is in the opposite direction: only the

informal sector is growing in Mexico

today, and informal employment

tends to be precarious and poorly

remunerated. Boosting formal

employment opportunities, however,

would require highly contentious

reforms to policy on energy, education,

telecommunications and labor law.

Unfortunately, Mexico’s political

parties have demonstrated a stubborn

reluctance to reach compromises

on these types of reforms, leading

to stalemate in Congress. Katz

concluded his remarks by noting

that Mexico’s demographic window

of opportunity, the period when the

country’s working-age population is

at its peak, is set to close in 2020. If

Mexico does not enact reforms before

then, he warned, the country will

remain permanently poor.

Poverty indicators lend credence

to this sobering assertion. According

to fi gures calculated by Coneval, the

Mexican government’s Council to

Evaluate Social Development Policy,

the number of Mexicans living below

the poverty line has increased by

roughly 6 million, from 44.7 to 50.6

million since 2006. This despite the

country’s concerted effort to decrease

the incidence of poverty, which

climbed to a high of 64 million in the

aftermath of the 1996 peso crisis. The

latest increase in the poverty level

refl ects the fact that many Mexican

citizens who had been precariously

perched above the poverty line before

the crisis today struggle to make ends

meet. According to data from the

Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y

Empleo (ENOE, National Survey on

Occupation and Employment), formal

unemployment has only increased

from 3.5 percent to 5.2 percent

since the second quarter of 2008,

but underemployment — defi ned as

involuntary part-time employment

— has almost doubled during the

same period, rising from 6.9 percent

to 11.1 percent of workers.

In light of their pessimism

regarding traditional manufacturing

and oil, participants at the forum

suggested other economic sectors

— such as green energy and health

tourism — that could lead the way to

a bilateral economic recovery. Special

attention was paid to potential

economic reforms that could generate

bilateral synergy, casting Mexico and

the United States as partners in new

ventures rather than as competitors.

David Bonior, a former

Democratic Whip of the U.S. House

of Representatives (Mich., 1991-2002)

and current president of American

Rights at Work, a nonprofi t labor

rights organization, offered two

proposals for reforms that could

lead to greater long-term economic

health for the United States. The fi rst

was investment in “green energy”

technology, such as solar power,

which, according to Bonior, has

the potential to strengthen the U.S.

manufacturing sector in the immediate

term and also to insure the country

against rising fossil fuel prices.

Bonior’s second proposal was

the passage of legislation, such as the

Employee Free Choice Act, that would

strengthen the bargaining power

of U.S. unions, ameliorating rising

inequality and the ongoing crisis of

insuffi cient demand from middle-class

consumers. While Reich, a former U.S.

Labor Secretary (1993-97), concurred

that improving the bargaining power

of the U.S. working class would be a

step in the right direction, he warned

that American manufacturing jobs are

facing several threats, including the

automation of industrial production

and the outsourcing of jobs.

Harley Shaiken, Chair of UC

Berkeley’s Center for Latin American

Studies, agreed that potential advances

in low-carbon energy technology

offer an opportunity for the U.S. and

Mexican economies to turn the corner.

Shaiken further emphasized that these

Mexico’s demographic window of opportunity.(Source: “De la población de México 2005-2050,” Consejo Nacional de Población/www.conapo.gob.mx.)



countries can learn a lesson from China about the close

relationship between manufacturing and development.

Rather than designing high-tech products domestically

and outsourcing the manufacturing, Shaiken argued that

the U.S. should retain domestic manufacturing jobs, as

China has done, by sustaining a close linkage between the

research and production processes of such energy-effi cient

technology as hybrid cars, solar-power components and

advanced battery systems.

Despite the dire economic prospects faced by the U.S.

and Mexico, the two countries’ shared suffering has the

potential to yield a positive outcome. With both countries

facing a need for far-reaching economic reform, new

opportunities may arise for closer bilateral collaboration.

Rafael Fernández de Castro, Presidential Adviser on

International Affairs and Competitiveness in Mexico,

shared his vision of “Nafta 2.0,” a set of reforms that

would usher in a period of greater economic cooperation.

Potential components of Nafta 2.0 include: allowing U.S.

retirees to use Medicare in Mexico, thereby contributing to

the Mexican economy and accessing less-costly treatment

than that provided by U.S. doctors; creating a North

American market for the copper trade; improving border

infrastructure, particularly by installing the necessary

facilities to safely allow the passage of Mexican trucks

into the U.S.; and implementing bilateral agreements on

labor policy. Such proposals are likely to be met with great

resistance; in particular, healthcare policy and border

security are highly contentious political issues in the

United States.

Whether such reforms take place depends on political

will and the outcome of future bilateral negotiations.

What the speakers at this panel made clear, however, is

that the economic fates of the United States and Mexico

are intimately linked. Without much-needed reforms,

both economies are likely to continue to stumble for the

foreseeable future.

The Economic Crisis Panel was one of four sessions of the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum held at UC Berkeley on August 23-25, 2009. The presenters included J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley; Isaac Katz, Professor of Economics at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México; and Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and former U.S. Secretary of Labor (1993-97).

Brian Palmer-Rubin is a Ph.D. student in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

American retirees go to Mexico for low-cost health care and affordable retirement options.

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14

Can a political system be described as democratic if its

own citizens are unable to access offi cial documents

or even basic information about government

processes? Analysts argue that “access to information” or

“transparency” reforms are a key element of the second step

of democratization, the ongoing political transformations

that secure the rule of law and open up opportunities for

greater political participation in fl edgling democracies. In

the last decade, these types of reforms have been adopted

by several Latin American governments, transforming the

relationship between agencies and the citizens they serve.

Transparency reforms are not only important in young

democracies, however. As demonstrated by the notoriously

opaque Bush administration — particularly with regard

to national security — basic political freedoms and the

quality of democracy are vulnerable to abuse if politicians

are not subject to public scrutiny.

The United States and Mexico are both at pivotal

moments in achieving greater government transparency.

In 2002, the Mexican Congress passed a federal

transparency law and created an agency to handle

information requests from citizens, the Instituto Federal

de Acceso a la Información Pública (Federal Agency for

Public Information Access, IFAI). And in the U.S., as one

of his first acts in office, President Barack Obama wrote a

memo to the heads of federal agencies and departments,

calling on them to help usher in what he called “a new era

of open government.”

While these advances are welcome steps in the

right direction, both countries still have work to do

Peering Behind the Curtainby Jude Joffe-Block and Brian Palmer-Rubin

U.S.– MEXICO FUTURES FORUMFederal police line Mexico City’s Zócalo before a speech by President Calderón.

(Photo by Julie Akers.)



to ensure greater openness and accountability in

their political systems, according to Kristin Adair,

Staff Counsel at the National Security Archive, a

research institute based in Washington, D.C., and

Juan Ernesto Pardinas, a consultant with the Instituto

Mexicano para la Competitividad (Mexican Institute

for Competitiveness). Adair and Pardinas delivered

presentations on these topics at the U.S.–Mexico Futures

Forum panel on Transparency and Accountability.

The U.S. pioneered access to information legislation

with the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA),

which was one of the fi rst laws ratifi ed worldwide to

allow citizens to request access to state documents. Yet

in the four decades since this law was adopted, the U.S.

government has experienced ebbs and fl ows in its level of

transparency. The latest transition of power is only the

most recent example. Adair explained that transparency

policy in the U.S. remains at a crossroads between the Bush

administration, which operated under the “presumption

of secrecy,” and the Obama administration, which has

pledged to disclose any information that does not clearly

fall under the category of classifi ed.

Still, even with the Obama administration’s renewed

commitment to transparency, the American system is

grappling with a number of challenges, according to

Adair. National security concerns still loom large and

are often in conf lict with the public’s “right-to-know.”

For example, the Obama administration cited security

concerns when it refused to release photographs of

tortured detainees in U.S. custody.

Furthermore, the procedure for responding to

information requests is not yet seamless. Federal agencies

do not have adequate resources to respond effectively to

citizen information requests, sometimes leading to long

delays in answering these petitions, which renders the

service unsuitable for media organizations operating

on short deadlines or lawyers who need information

for pending legal proceedings. In addition to these

logistical concerns is the technical challenge of archiving

government records and communications when so much

government business is now done over email.

Moreover, the system lacks any built-in oversight or

enforcement mechanisms; complaints for unjust denials

of information requests must go though the courts

for resolution — a lengthy and arduous path. There is

reason for optimism, however. Adair noted that in the

fall of 2009, the Office of Government Services will be

introduced, employing an ombudsman who will take

up the cause of citizens in cases where agencies did not

comply with their information requests.

One hope for the Obama administration’s new policy

of openness is that it will translate into freer information

sharing between U.S. and Mexican authorities. Adair

argued that security interests would benefit if law

enforcement agencies on both sides of the border were

to have a more streamlined process for coordination.

Also, improving bilateral communication regarding

environmental health issues is necessary to avoid public

health disasters in border areas, pointed out Adrián

Fernández Bremauntz, president of the Instituto Nacional

de Ecologia (INE, National Ecological Institute), a

research organization of the Mexican government.

Not only are there likely benefi ts to information

sharing across the border, Adair also highlighted several

ways in which the U.S. could improve access to information

by following the example of Mexico’s IFAI. First, the IFAI

handles information requests through a streamlined and

user-friendly, Internet-based system in contrast to the U.S.

system, where requests must be submitted to individual

agencies. Second, the IFAI consistently sets and monitors

deadlines for government agencies to respond to citizen

requests. While Mexican agencies have up to 30 days to

respond, Adair cited cases of U.S. agencies taking as long

as 20 years.

Indeed, Mexico’s approach to government

transparency is both innovative and far reaching. The

IFAI, which serves the role of intermediary between

citizens and government agencies, is a unique institution.

In most other countries with access to information laws

— like the U.S. — citizens submit their requests directly

to the agencies from which they require the information.

The procedure and the success rate often vary widely

between agencies. In contrast, the IFAI centralizes the

process, allowing citizens to submit all of their requests for

information from federal government agencies through a

single, user-friendly website. With the click of a mouse,

a citizen can also register an appeal if she feels that an

information request was unduly denied or an agency’s

response was inadequate. A board of IFAI commissioners

then considers the appeal, with the mandate to insist on

disclosure in cases where the information requested is not

explicitly exempt according to the 2002 transparency law.

This system has yielded positive results: a recent analysis

found that over 80 percent of information requests handled

by the IFAI were fulfi lled within the established deadline.

The IFAI is not without its faults, however. Requesting

government information remains a diffi cult proposition

for the average citizen. Information requests that are not

composed using bureaucratic jargon or referencing offi cial

documents are often unsuccessful. Agencies can deny >>


16 Peering Behind the Curtain

requests by claiming that the information sought does not

exist. These denials are close to impossible for the citizen

requester or the IFAI to verify.

Mexican statesman Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas noted

that one of the IFAI’s greatest weaknesses is its inability

to compel compliance in cases where agencies refuse to

provide information that the appeals board has already

directed them to release. Mexico’s Secretaría de la Función

Pública (Ministry of Public Administration), a federal

agency charged with promoting governmental trans-

parency and accountability, is vested with the power to

enforce compliance with the rulings of the IFAI appeals

board. As Cárdenas pointed out, however, this enforcement

body often appears to be more interested in catching people

in the act of malfeasance than actually preventing abuses,

missing many opportunities to improve the provision of

information. Pardinas agreed with Cárdenas’ observation

but was cautiously optimistic that a newer agency, the

Auditoría Superior de la Federación, which is modeled

on the U.S. Government Accountability Offi ce, has the

potential to improve the oversight system for Mexico’s

transparency mechanism.

Several of the shortcomings of Mexico’s access to

information system are described in an article by Jonathan

Fox, Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies

at UC Santa Cruz, entitled “Mexico’s Right-to-Know

Reforms,” published in the Fall 2008 edition of this

journal. Fox recounts the experiences of grassroots civil

society organizations in the Mexican state of Guerrero that

attempted to use the public information system to uncover

offi cial documents revealing misappropriation of federal

funds for state-run rural health clinics. Even though

activists from these organizations had personally seen the

documents requested, they were told by the Department

of Health that the documents did not exist. Their appeals

were unsuccessful because the IFAI appeals board was

unable to verify whether or not the documents existed.

This example demonstrates another weakness in

Mexican government transparency. State and local

governments are not subject to the federal access to

information law or to the jurisdiction of the IFAI, leading

to generally lower levels of transparency for these entities.

Pardinas’ presentation highlighted the serious

inadequacies in government oversight at the state and

municipal levels in Mexico. He argued that Mexico’s

decentralization of executive agencies in the 1990s was

too hasty and failed to create adequate provisions for

ensuring responsible governance at the local level. In

particular, he cited a lack of standard budgeting practices

at the state and local levels. As a case in point, Pardinas

compared the state of Jalisco’s detailed 2008 budget,

which totaled 277 pages, with the single paragraph

produced by Baja California Sur.

Many analysts support Pardinas’ assertion that the

shortcomings of Mexico’s federal political system are the

result of the haphazard way in which decentralization

reforms were adopted. Decentralization began to pick up

steam in the 1990s, when the Carlos Salinas de Gortari

and Ernesto Zedillo administrations expanded state and

municipal budgets as much as tenfold and allowed state

governments to drastically increase taxation of their

citizens. By 1997, state and municipal governments had

acquired much greater control over such policy areas

as education, health care, public works and economic

development. These reforms took place during a period

in which the once-hegemonic Partido Revolucionario

Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI)

began to face serious threats to its electoral dominance

at the national level. The party was able to strengthen

its electoral base at a more local level by decentralizing

budgets and policymaking to governors and municipal

presidents. However, these reforms were undertaken

without the necessary preconditions: capacity building

for state and municipal governments; legislation to guide

budgeting and public administration; and mechanisms for

coordination between federal, state and local leaders.

To illustrate his point that decentralization had led

to inadequate government oversight, Pardinas shared the

colorful case of José Antonio Ríos Granados, the former

The terse budget for the state of Baja California Sur.

Image courtesy of the state of Baja C

alifornia Sur.



mayor of Tultitlán, a small city in the

state of Mexico, who took advantage

of lax oversight to alter the municipal

budget and to elevate his own salary

to roughly $250,000 — a fi gure that

compares favorably with the salaries

of many G-8 leaders. The enterprising

mayor also used government funds

to attract the B-movie industry to

Tultitlán, with the condition that

he appear in fi lms shot in his city.

Pardinas theorized that a lack of

oversight led many other local and

state governments to squander

their budget surpluses during times

of prosperity, an outcome that is

exacting a painful cost for Mexico in

today’s dire economic climate.

Still, a great triumph of Mexico’s

access to information law is that

citizen watchdog efforts can expose

these instances of government mis-

management. Uncovering corruption

with facts obtained through IFAI

information requests can also be a

source of empowerment for groups

that are traditionally marginalized.

C.R. Hibbs, Managing Director

of the Hewlett Foundation’s Mexico

Program, recounted one such case

to the group of participants in

the session. She told of a woman’s

organization in rural Veracruz that

used an information request to access

health records that proved that the

government had falsifi ed documents

in order to deny them essential

medical procedures to which they

were entitled. By exposing this

misconduct, these women were able

to draw attention to their cause and

pressure the state to provide the

promised medical services. In light of

cases such as these, Hibbs urged the

forum participants not to lose sight of

“the power of the information itself

to change lives and have an impact on

even the poorest of the poor and the

least-empowered citizens.”

As Harley Shaiken, Chair of

the UC Berkeley Center for Latin

American Studies observed, the

discussion went beyond transparency

and accountability and was, in fact,

about the infrastructure necessary

for a democratic society. “Absent

transparency, development becomes

far more complicated. Absent

transparency and accountability,

democratic processes are much more

uncertain,” Shaiken concluded.

The Transparency and Accountability Panel was a session of the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum held at UC Berkeley on August 23-25, 2009.

Presenters included Kristin Adair, Staff Counsel at the National Security Archive, and Juan Ernesto Pardinas, Consultant for the Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad.

Jude Joffe-Block is a student in the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Brian Palmer-Rubin is a Ph.D. student in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

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This B-movie, shot in Tultitlán, features the town’s then-mayor, José Antonio Ríos Granados.


18 Headwinds for Climate Change Policy

“The climate imperative is truly pressing…

every single lesson on the climate science

side is bad.” Dan Kammen, a UC Berkeley

professor of Energy and Public Policy, pulled no punches

in his opening remarks as part of the Alternative Energy

Panel at the 2009 U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum. Oceans,

terrestrial ecosystems and the Arctic are experiencing rates

of change that scientists had not previously predicted in

any of the global climate models, he asserted. Kammen’s

fellow panelist, Bracken Hendricks of the Center for

American Progress, elaborated on his grim prognosis,

pointing to the human and economic costs of such rapid

environmental change: “Two to four billion people

going without access to reliable drinking water is not an

environmental problem. It’s a tremendous geopolitical

security problem. It’s a health problem. It’s a devastating

social and economic problem.”

The panel, which also included Adrián Fernández

Bremauntz, President of Mexico’s National Ecology

Institute, continued a discussion begun at the 2008 Futures

Forum held in Mexico City. At that conference, Kammen

documented the continuing rise in global carbon emissions

despite the growing availability of cost-effective, low-carbon

technologies. Worse still, he warned, when oil prices rise,

vast reserves of even more environmentally damaging oil

from tar sands and other unconventional sources will enter

the global fuel mix unless policies explicitly require that the

energy gap be fi lled with clean, renewable sources such as

wind, solar and tidal energy. “It’s going to be a policy battle,

fi rst and foremost,” he said then. “And that’s a sobering

thought because, in this area, policy in the United States

moves slowly.”

Less than a year later, the tone of the conversation

had shifted dramatically. This time, Kammen focused his

comments on the “remarkable” changes in the political

landscape and on a range of new opportunities arising to

support a cleaner energy economy. The most notable change

in the political landscape was, of course, the election of

President Barack Obama. With a sizable portion of economic

stimulus money being directed to clean energy and a climate

change bill making its way through Congress, addressing

climate change has moved up the political agenda.

Now, the greatest challenge is keeping up with the

tremendous opportunities afforded by the stimulus funding,

Kammen explained. “We are dramatically understaffed…

the number of people who are expert and working on the

diverse aspects of the low-carbon economy is dramatically

smaller than the most minimum set you would want in these

areas.” With roughly one-eighth of stimulus funding being

channeled into clean energy, “all federal energy offi ces, in

the very short term, now have an infi nite amount of money,

in the sense that there is well more money available than

they can spend.”

The implication is that so-called shovel-ready clean

energy projects can now be dramatically scaled-up.

Kammen cited one example, a clever fi nancing scheme fi rst

proposed in the city of Berkeley, which is designed to take the

sting out of upfront costs for homeowners. Under the plan,

cities borrow money at low rates, pay for energy retrofi ts and

Headwinds for Climate Change Policyby Christopher M. Jones

U.S.– MEXICO FUTURES FORUM

President Calderón speaks at the opening of La Ventosa, a wind farm in Oaxaca.

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solar installations on the homes of participating residents and

then simply charge homeowners the loan amount over time

by marginally increasing their property taxes, the amount

of which is offset by lower monthly energy bills. In part

due to such fi nancing options, Kammen argued that solar

could contribute upwards of 20 percent of U.S. electricity by

2025 or sooner. Coupled with a similar or greater amount

of energy from wind, these two renewable energy sources

alone could cut greenhouse gas emissions from electricity in

half. Portugal already gets 42 percent of its electricity from

wind during peak times, Kammen noted.

Building on this example, Bracken Hendricks pointed

out that the benefits of the Berkeley model extend far

beyond greenhouse gas reductions. With creative energy

financing, “you’re getting consumer savings. You’re

getting job creation. You’re deploying clean energy

technology. You’re reducing carbon emissions, and

you’re creating all these spillover economic development

benefits.” In other words, “solving global warming is

really an investment agenda” that can ultimately drive

economic development in a virtuous cycle of positive

feedback loops.

Reiterating a point by Kammen, Hendricks maintained

that the transition to a clean energy economy is not just

about creating green jobs; it’s about creating jobs, plain and

simple. It’s about creating more vibrant and sustainable

economies. “Fundamentally we’re asking the wrong

question if we ask how much does it cost to build a low-

carbon economy.” The important question is not whether

we should invest in a clean energy future, but what, exactly,

are we going to build. “How do we rewire the grid around

renewable energy? How do we go block-by-block and

household-by-household and retrofi t for energy effi ciency?”

he asked.

If the debate in the United States is shifting to

substance, the focus in Mexico is shifting to international

diplomacy. Mexico has become the fi rst developing country

to voluntarily commit to greenhouse gas reduction, and

it is now an active player in international climate change

mitigation talks through the Kyoto Protocol process. A

recent proposal by the Calderón administration would

create a “green fund” for global development that would

allow any country, regardless of its level of economic

development, to borrow from and invest in the fund. As

Hendricks noted, this changes the way we think about

the issues in fundamental ways. Instead of framing the

international climate debate in terms of the interests of

rich vs. poor countries, the concept of a green fund creates

a framework for international cooperation.

For panelist Adrián Fernández Bremauntz, Calderón’s

proposals don’t go far enough. Mexico should accept

a mandatory or binding greenhouse gas reduction

commitment. “The time for sitting on the fence is over,” he

said. What is needed is a comprehensive climate strategy

that creates an “optimal package” of interventions that is

appropriate for Mexico’s political, economic and social

context. Unfortunately, the time for Mexico to create its

own strategy is quickly running out. “We are moving at a

very slow pace. The time will come that we will have to sign

a policy that was designed by someone else,” he warned.

Not surprisingly, a major challenge to designing

effective climate policy in Mexico and other developing

countries is a vast shortage of technical expertise. Echoing

Kammen’s previous point about human capital, Fernández

added, “If the United States is understaffed, think about

Mexico. We have scarce human capital in Mexico. That’s

Mexico. What about Central America?” In spite of these

diffi culties, Mexico and other developing countries

should work quickly to create a set of climate policies

and interventions that are within reach. This is critical if

>>


20 Headwinds for Climate Change Policy

appropriate reduction targets are to be

set for individual countries.

For Mexico, Fernández proposed

that target setting should be based

on: 1) actions that can be taken at the

country’s own initiative; 2) actions that

can be fi nanced through subsidized

international loans; and 3) actions

that are possible if the upfront costs

of moving to clean technology are

paid for by countries with historic

responsibility for global warming.

If all these reductions are added

up, Mexico could make a serious

commitment to reducing carbon

emissions. He estimated that “a 30 to

40 percent deviation from businesses

as usual” was possible if there was an

international commitment to helping

Mexico reduce emissions.

The question-and-answer session

highlighted the gap between the

political will to take a leadership

position in climate change negotiations

that exists at high levels of Mexico’s

government and the lack of widespread

popular concern about the issue. Rafael

Fernández de Castro, Presidential

Advisor on International Affairs and

Competitiveness, noted, “I don’t see that

President Calderón is gaining anything

politically for being responsible,

environmentally speaking.” With

security and development at the top of

the Mexican agenda, addressing climate

change is simply not an attractive

political platform.

Isaac Katz, a professor of

Economics at ITAM, pointed to

additional institutional barriers.

“Building a wind farm in Mexico is

quite impossible,” he maintained.

The most attractive sites are on ejidos

(communal lands) and, therefore,

approval has to go through the

Ministry of Land Reform. Mexico’s

petroleum monopoly, Pemex,

presents another important obstacle.

As a strategy intended to fi ght poverty,

Pemex keeps energy prices artifi cially

low, thereby undercutting incentives

to conserve. Furthermore, as

Fernández noted, the county’s energy strategy mandates that electricity be produced by the cheapest possible means, which leads to the use of

highly polluting domestic fuel oil. In short, changing institutions takes time, and time is of the essence if the most damaging effects of climate change are to be averted. Several participants lamented the amount of time already wasted. UC Berkeley economist J. Bradford Delong noted that 16 years had elapsed since President Clinton dropped the “Btu tax” — a proposal to tax the heat content of fuels — in 1993. In his view, decades of delay have placed a future with a 2°C rise in temperature out of reach. Barring some miracle, “we face a 5°C global warming future over the next 70 to 150 years,” he warned. Both Hendricks and Kammen were surprisingly upbeat in the face of these comments. “While I accept the premise that it’s tragic that we lost that time, it’s also irrelevant,” Hendricks contended. “Because if we do nothing, we end up with that future. That future is unacceptable. How are we going to get busy, tomorrow, to build this?” he challenged. Kammen concurred, adding, “it’s remarkable… how quickly these technologies have changed when there actually was a focus on them.” The need to bring the developing world on board was also a common area of concern, and a prescient one, as developments at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen attest. At the Forum, Kammen argued that despite the fact that “it’s a logical negotiating position for China and India and many other countries to say, ‘Global warming was created largely by the North, therefore it’s your problem,’” China, at least, has made signifi cant investments in clean technology. In spite of the differences between the developed and the

developing world, Fernández

maintained that “there’s agreement

on what needs to be done.” The

problem lies in how the burden is

Projected green collar jobs created and power generated by state under renewable portfolio standard (RPS) regulations, which set requirements for the proportion of energy produced from renewable sources.(Source: UC Berkeley Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory/rael.berkeley.edu.)



going to be shared. Katz built on this idea, arguing that

a signifi cant stumbling block will be how to compensate

the losers. “The senators from the Midwest are really

opposing any energy bill that will cause a reduction in

GDP production,” he noted. “If we take that to the world

as a whole, developing countries are less willing to reduce

carbon emissions because they are poor. The relative cost

for them is higher than for the U.S.” There needs to be

a mechanism to compensate those who will experience a

drop in production if they are asked to reduce emissions,

he asserted.

To wrap up, the panelists were asked to summarize the

single, most important point they wanted the participants to

take away from the session. Professor Kammen’s answer was

succinct. “The one most important idea is pricing carbon.

Period. No footnotes, no nothing. If we don’t price carbon,

even to some degree, we will never send a consistent signal

to business, and we won’t reward companies that fi nd a way

to innovate and go to that lower carbon future... Putting a

price on carbon that is too low is better than no price on

carbon.” Until we do that, he concluded, “everything else

we’re doing is a holding pattern, cobbling things together.”

In the months since the Futures Forum, the

Copenhagen Climate Change Conference has come and

gone to surprisingly small effect, and the cap-and-trade

bill has stalled in Congress. While the cobbling together

continues at the sub-state level, global policy remains in a

holding pattern, with developed and developing countries

facing off in a high-stakes game of chicken. It remains to

be seen whether the dynamism of new policies and new

technologies will be enough to stabilize the climate in the

absence of a binding international treaty.

The Alternative Energy Panel was a session of the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum held at UC Berkeley on August 23-25, 2009. The presenters included Daniel M. Kammen, 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy at UC Berkeley; Bracken Hendricks, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Adrián Fernández Bremauntz, President of Mexico’s National Ecology Institute.

Christopher M. Jones is Staff Research Associate at the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.

Futures Forum coverage continues on page 31>>

President Barack Obama speaks with world leaders at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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22 The Making of a Maestro

On September 23, 2009, the Center for Latin American Studies and the Berkeley Art Museum held a public event to celebrate Fernando Botero’s donation of his Abu Ghraib series of paintings and drawings to the University of California, Berkeley. At the event, the internationally acclaimed artist was presented with the Chancellor’s Citation for his lifetime of achievement. He then engaged in a public discussion about his life and work with the museum’s director, Lawrence Rinder.

Rinder: Your fi rst presentation as an artist was in 1948, when I believe you were only 16 years old. You sold an illustration, if I am not mistaken.

Botero: Well, yes. I started to participate in group shows in

my hometown with the older painters of the region. Then I

moved to Bogotá and stopped my high school studies and

became a professional artist very early. I was 17 or 18 when I

started as a professional.

R: This work from 1949, “Crying Woman,” was done only a year after you fi rst began to show publicly. Historically, 1948 was the fi rst year of what has become known as “La violencia” — which was a tragic and tremendously important moment in the history of Colombia. We’re still seeing the after-effects today. And it’s unfortunate that your own career began at the very moment when Colombia began to unravel. I wonder if you could talk about “La violencia,” what it was and how it impacted your early years as an artist.

B: It had a great impact because, of course, young people

are very sensitive to these manifestations of violence, social

injustice, etc. We were very touched by this situation. As

you said, violence started in Colombia with the killing

of Jorge Gaitán, who was a popular leader who was going

to be president. A very reactionary group in Colombia

killed him, and then the reaction of the masses was total.

They burned half of Bogotá and Medellín. Every young

The Making of a MaestroLawrence Rinder Interviews Fernando Botero

ART Fernando Botero in conversation with Lawrence Rinder, September 2009.

Photo by Peg Skorpinski.



intellectual, student, artist, etc. was

very touched by the situation.

From the point of view of

painting, of course, at that time we

had very little information about

international art. What we got mostly

were reports of Mexican art. I was

very interested in Diego Rivera and

especially Orozco, as you see in

“Crying Woman.” At the same time,

there is an interesting element in

this watercolor from 1949: there was

already a special interest in volume

that you can see in the arm of the

“Crying Woman.” My watercolors of

that time were always very volumetric,

and I just cannot explain why. Really

it was unusual. When I was a student

in Florence a couple of years later, I

was able to rationalize the importance

of volume and understand that in

these watercolors there was already a

tendency inside me. That’s why I was

so enthusiastic about Quattrocento

art [the art of 15th century Italy].

R: You went to Europe in 1952. I imagine part of the reason was to see the great works of art but also to get out of the declining political and social situation in Colombia.

B: It was mostly because I wanted to

see the Great Masters, the museums,

etc. I didn’t know much about the

Great Masters because there was

so little information. I knew there

was somebody called Michelangelo,

Raphael, Titian, Velázquez, but

there was very little information. So

when I got to Europe, I discovered

their fantastic work and that art was

much more important than I had

ever thought, more complex and

extraordinary.

My original plan was to go to

Paris, as every young artist aspires

to do. Then I changed my plans and

went to Italy. That is why my work

is very involved with Italian art,

especially the Quattrocento: Uccello,

Piero della Francesca, etc. As a

matter of fact, I realized when I went

to Florence that Mexican art was

actually inspired by and derivative of

the Quattrocento. It was better to see

the source of this art. From then on, I

was not looking at Mexican art; I was

looking at Quattrocento.

R: And then in ’56 you actually did go to Mexico City. Did you meet any of the muralists at that time?

B: I met Diego Rivera once but in a

group of about ten people. He was there;

I was there.

R: And the infl uence had already occurred in your youth.

B: Well, no. I was very inf luenced by

Mexican art in the beginning because

that was the only thing you saw. Then

once I went to Europe, I saw the

difference — I saw the Great Masters

that inspired the Mexican work. Then

I was much less impressed.

>>

“Crying Woman,” watercolor on paper, 59 x 44 cm, 1949. (© Fernando Botero, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.)



I think the Mexican artists were

very important because they refl ected

the political problems of their time.

The reality of the country was

revolutionary, and beyond style or

technique, they were confronting the

very human problems in Mexico.

R: I want to go back to the point you made about volume. You said earlier that volume was an issue even at the very beginning in the 1949 watercolor. I wonder if you could talk about this picture, “Still Life With Mandolin.” I think it was a bit of an epiphany for you.

B: A very early work, yes. By then

I saw the importance of volume

in paintings. I was reading a lot

of Bernard Berenson who gave

tremendous importance to volume.

As a matter of fact, he created a scale

of importance based on the ability

to produce what he called “tactile

values.” As I said before, in my early

work there was an element of volume.

Then, all my work became more and

more involved with volume but in a

way that was very derivative of the

Italian volume.

One day, I was painting a

mandolin, and the moment I was

going to make the hole in the

instrument, I did it very small. There

was something there that I identifi ed

with immediately. I saw that it became

much more important, much more

radical. The contrast between the

small detail and the generous outline

makes the form become much more

important and aggressive and sensual

and so many things. People recognize

my work very easily because they see

this exaltation, this extravagant or

exaggerated volume.

Volume was very important

through the centuries after the time

of Giotto up to the Impressionists.

Volume was expressed more or

less in every painting. After the

Impressionists, and in the 20th

century, art became much more

dimensionally fl at, and volume was

forgotten. For me, part of the magic

of a painting is the fact that on this

fl at surface you have the illusion of

space and volume. It really is part

of the mystery of painting. Without

volume, an element of mystery and

sensuality is missing. That is why I

am critical of much of this art that

was extremely decorative. I wanted

my work to reincorporate this

element that was somehow forgotten

or dismissed in the 20th century.

R: So you began applying volume to figures in quite a pronounced way, as in this piece called “Dead Bishops”

from 1958, a really remarkable work that actually anticipates one of the works upstairs, in the Abu Ghraib collection.

B: Yes, exactly. As a matter of fact, I

was thinking of this painting.

R: In the 1958 painting you can see that we are talking about the rotund outline with the small detail. It’s clear. There is another element to this painting, a quality to the palette and also to the brush stroke, which really only existed in your work for about three or four years, right at this point from 1958 to ’61 or ’62. The palette is almost fauve: bright colors, more expressionistic in a way. I think this was a period when you were also living in New York, and I wonder whether there was an infl uence at all from the Abstract Expressionists, or what was the context of this work?

B: I saw the Abstract Expressionist

paintings and was very seduced

by them. It was a very seductive

movement because of the freedom,

the generosity, the sensuality of the

application of color, the brush stroke.

I started painting with a brush stroke

that was apparent.

The art of the Quattrocento

always has a very fi ne surface, and,

historically, most art has very smooth

surfaces. There were very few artists

— like Frans Hals, like Goya in

his Black Paintings — who left the

brush stroke very evident. But the

Abstract Expressionist paintings were

so interesting that for some years I

was doing this. But then, in a way, I

found that it was a contradiction.

I was trying to bring some calm to

my work. I admire the calm of Piero

della Francesca very much. I admire

the calm in Egyptian and Greek art.

Calm gives a sense of eternity to the

form; this exaltation, this fever of the continued on page 28 >>

“Still Life With Mandolin,” oil on canvas, 67 x 121 cm, 1957.

© Fernando Botero, courtesy M

arlborough Gallery, N

ew York.



Left:“Dead Bishops,” oil on canvas, 175 x 190 cm, 1965.

FOLLOWING PAGE:“Abu Ghraib 89,” 171 x 111 cm,

oil on canvas, 2006.

(All images © Fernando Botero, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.)

Right:“Dead Bishops,” oil on canvas,

190 x 218 cm, 1958.

26 Article Title


Spring 2009 27




brush stroke, was a contradiction. That is why, at a certain

moment, I stopped.

R: So, for example, this version from 1965 — it’s the same painting but done in the style of Piero della Francesca. So why a pile of dead bishops?

B: I really don’t know my reason exactly. But the reason

I painted people from the church is because, in the

Renaissance, people went around with the most fantastic

colors. They painted that way because the models were then

full of color. In our time, most people wear grey or black

or white, and the people of the church and the toreros are

the only ones who use extravagant colors. For me, it was a

pretext to use color.

R: It’s like a still life of fruit, but instead it’s dead bishops.

B: Why were they in a pile? I really don’t know. I cannot

explain that.

R. And what about these folks? This is called “Offi cial Portrait of the Military Junta” from 1971. I think that this clearly is not just about a grouping of color. This is really a social, a political satire. The composition here very closely resembles the Goya painting “The Family of Charles IV.” So tell me about this. Is this a particular family? What was going on socially and politically at this time?

B: Well, this was the time of the Somozas, the Trujillos and

so many military juntas in Latin America. And of course

everybody who was intelligent was against this ridiculous

thing. It was very easy to make satires when you heard the

stories of generals who were fi ve years old and the kinds

of things that they did in the Dominican Republic and

Guatemala and places like that. Most of Latin America

suffered this kind of military dictatorship. And I did a series

of paintings that were satires of these people. Of course,

Goya’s “The Family of Charles IV” was a good example. I

did a presentation of the Latin American family that was

like “The Family of Charles IV.”

R: And so, in this case, the volumizing of the fi gures seems to be clearly a satirical element. Would you say that, in this case, that formal quality plays the role of satire?

B: Well, the thing is that this volume, for some reason,

inspired people to think that it was funny. When you see

somebody who is very slim, you don’t think it’s funny. But

you think that somebody who is fat is funny.

Actually, I was not trying to do satire. I was trying to

satirize the costumes and the fact that there were these little

generals. I did a presentation that was satirical, but it was

done with the same spirit that I do still life. All my life, I

have been painting still life because the act of painting is

caressing, is trying to communicate sensuality and peace

through the form. Even if I do a painting on a subject that is

repulsive, in a way I have to treat it with the same love that I

treat a fruit. That is the contradiction, but that’s the way it is.

R: What was the response to this work in Latin America? Did you have any diffi culty among the ruling classes? They must have sensed that all was not well, or did they not even notice? Did they commission pieces like this?

B: Actually, I did not meet any of these dictators. I was

living in Europe and New York. But the painting became

extremely popular. People were reproducing it in many

places. That was the positive thing. Actually, that was what I

wanted, that the satire be planted in the mind of the people

so they would see how ridiculous these dictators were.

R: So the Abu Ghraib series is not at all new in your work, in that it takes on the subject of state violence. This is actually something that you have been representing for decades. This untitled piece here from 1978 is one example, but one of many. You’ve been speaking about the role of art to create a feeling of calm and that every painting is fi nally a still life, but can you speak for a moment about the relationship between, maybe not art, but an artist’s practice and state violence? How do you think art should respond? How have you responded?

B: You cannot be indifferent to situations that are so

repulsive. At that time, the police were treating people

very badly. There were these two paintings that ref lected

the situation. Later on, I ref lected the violence in my

country, in Colombia. I did a series of paintings that were

very dramatic…

R: …of the drug war…

B: …of the massacres, the parades of coffi ns. You would see

these parades of 50 or 60 coffi ns coming down the main

streets of these towns. I saw this on television, and I did

paintings. As a matter of fact, I donated that series to the

National Museum in Colombia.

Every time that I’m impressed or shocked by

something, it comes out in my work. I was shocked by the

torture in Iraq at the time of the Bush administration. It



was something the whole world was against. Everybody

that was involved with art, because of the sensibility of the

artist, was more shocked. That is why I developed like a

rage. And one day I started to visualize what was going on

in that prison, and then I began painting. I kept working

and working. It became an obsession until I said what I

had to say. And somehow it was like a therapy, because

the more I painted, the more calm there was in my heart.

When I fi nished doing the series, I felt peace, somehow. It

was a therapy really. But I knew that I had to do something

because it was such a shocking thing. And I did.

R: I wanted to ask you about Christianity because this is a theme that was discussed quite a bit in the conversations that took place on the occasion of your last visit. Professor Tom Laqueur called the Passion of Christ, “the paradigmatic instance of suffering in the Western tradition,” and he suggested that this theme was a very strong undercurrent in your work.

As a sort of counterpoint to that, T.J. Clark, who is also on the faculty here, said that your work might have been stronger if it had stayed, “true to the sordid meaninglessness of the moments captured on fi lm.” He wished that you had explored Abu Ghraib’s fundamental distance from the narratives that have defi ned Western artistic culture, such as the association of physical suffering with redemption and the sacred. So two different points of view: one seeing the connection to Christianity as empowering the work and giving its message added volume, if you will, and another saying that the allusion to the narrative of Christianity and the connection between suffering and sacredness is not really true to what happened, that there was little sacred in Abu Ghraib. Can you talk about that?

B: People have often found a connection between religious

art, Christianity, the Passion of Christ and the work I do.

The truth is that in Latin America, religious art shows a very >>

“The Offi cial Portrait of the Military Junta,” oil on canvas, 173 x 218 cm, 1971.

© F

erna

ndo

Bote

ro, c

ourt

esy

Mar

lbor

ough

Gal

lery

, New

Yor

k.



bloody presentation of Christ. It was the kind of the thing

you saw in every church. Where there are no museums, no

traditions, no galleries, the art you see when you are a child

and an adolescent is at church.

At the same time, in Latin America the subject of art

has traditionally been religious. Ninety percent of the

work was religious. Then, in the 20th century, there was an

absence of religion in paintings, in art. In a way, it was like

what happened with volume; volume was an element that

disappeared. Religion disappeared as a subject matter in

20th-century art. It had been extremely important for

centuries. Then, since there was this tradition in Latin

America, I liked to do more of this subject matter, even

though I’m not a religious person. But I saw the beauty of

these religious paintings by the old masters of Latin America.

And I like the idea of doing something that is forbidden

somehow, to give importance to a subject matter that is

taboo in modern art. The conception of most art critics

is that this subject matter is taboo. I like the idea of doing

things that everyone thinks you shouldn’t do. Why not?

There is a great tradition of religious art in art history.

And, for me, art history is extremely important. I am

always thinking of the panoramic view of art. If something

was important then, why is it not now? Why can’t you do

it now? In a way, art history gives you the authorization to

sell certain things. Why — if it was great art — why is it

not now?

When I did the Abu Ghraib paintings, all of this

background came out. It is normal. But somehow a lot was

read into it with the Abu Ghraib series. It’s not that I was

trying to do Christ. It is what happened. And it came as an

afterthought. It’s not that I did it on purpose.

(Audience question): Why the relative silence from American artists on this particular subject during this time?

B: I think the only logical explanation why the Americans

— who I’m sure were personally shocked and disgusted with

the situation — didn’t do anything, is because American art

is mostly abstract and conceptual. Perhaps some people did

do something that made a reference to this torture, but it

was not clear. Doing a direct, clear presentation would be a

violation of the philosophy of the conceptual artist. There

are very few well-known fi gurative artists in America, and

they didn’t do anything. But most art today in America

is abstract and conceptual, and it is very diffi cult to say

something like this if you’re an abstract painter. That is

the only logical explanation why it was not done. But it is

incredible at the same time.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau presents Fernando Botero with the Chancellor’s Citation.

Photo by Peg Skorpinski.



Silver or Lead:Confronting the Business of Violenceby Wendy Muse Sinek

U.S.–MEXICO FUTURES FORUM

Mexico is fast becoming one of the world’s most

violent countries. In 2008, the United States

military issued a Joint Operating Environment

Report that paired Mexico with Pakistan and suggested

that both states were “failing” and susceptible to rapid

collapse. While many analysts, both in Mexico and

elsewhere, strongly dispute this claim, the situation is

undeniably grim. According to a 2009 report published by

Mexico’s Citizen Council for Public Security and Justice,

the murder rate has increased four-fold in Mexico over the

past two years, and as of September 2009, Ciudad Juárez

was found to be more dangerous than either Medellín or

Baghdad. Today, drug traffi cking gangs routinely battle

with President Calderón’s federal troops. Mexican citizens

fi nd themselves caught in the crossfi re, and Americans

worry that violence will spill across the border and into

their front yards.

What sparked this chain of events? More importantly,

what can policy makers in Mexico and the U.S. do to

improve security on both sides of the border? Through

the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum, UC Berkeley’s Center for

Latin American Studies convened a roundtable discussion

to address these issues. Prominent Mexican and U.S.

elected offi cials met with foreign-policy experts from both >>

An unoffi cial street sign in Mexico.

Phot

o by

mañ

sk.


32 Silver or Lead

countries to discuss causes and solutions to this crisis.

Fully aware of the limitations of any given policy response,

the participants delved into the contours of the debate to

brainstorm realistic policy alternatives.

Shannon O’Neil, Fellow for Latin American Studies at

the Council on Foreign Relations, opened the discussion

with an analysis of the U.S. response to the Mexican

security crisis. On the one hand, Mexico deserves to be at

the top of the foreign policy agenda; the two countries have

become steadily more intertwined over the past 20 years.

Trade, foreign direct investment and even immigration

now fl ow in both directions. These transnational ties

alone are suffi cient to warrant increased U.S. attention.

However, the rise of Mexico on the foreign policy agenda

is due, sadly, to increased concerns over violence.

Given this heightened interest in Washington, what

has the U.S. government done? O’Neil stated that the

main policy result has been the Mérida Initiative, a

security cooperation and assistance package for Mexico

and countries in Central America. According to the U.S.

State Department, the program will provide $1.57 billion

over three years to address security issues in Mexico, with

the money going toward military hardware and training

as well as some institution-building initiatives. In

addition, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms

and Explosives will receive some funding for border

investigations and the Treasury Department will step up

anti-money laundering efforts.

While the Mérida Initiative will undoubtedly provide

needed resources, O’Neil argued that when viewed in

comparative perspective, Mexico still appears to be

an afterthought. Consider that Colombia, which has

generally overcome the security challenges of 2000-01

and is today a relatively stable state, still receives $600

million per year. Pakistan, Mexico’s “partner” as a failing

state, is slated to receive $5 billion for 2010 alone.

More importantly, O’Neil stressed that efforts

to increase security at the border miss larger social,

political and economic concerns that underlie the

escalating violence. For example, the priorities of the

Mérida Initiative were designed with the Plan Colombia

template in mind. However, the security situation in

Mexico is very different. The Colombian state struggled

to achieve a monopoly over the legitimate use of force

throughout their territory because guerrilla movements,

led by drug- and weapons-trafficking organizations,

had gained control over significant portions of the

country. Large swaths of territory were without a strong,

Blood and bullet holes mark a Tijuana murder scene.

Photo by Guillerm

o Arias/A

P Photo.



legitimate state presence, and guerrillas were quick to

fill the void. By contrast, the Mexican state is visible and

present in every community, and state institutions are

found throughout the territory. The issue for Mexico is

that these institutions are weak, and in many cases, they

have been co-opted by nefarious elements. As a result,

critical resources need to be dedicated to institution-

building initiatives. Hardware and helicopters are useful

for taming guerrilla factions but not for strengthening

institutional legitimacy and the rule of law.

For a true security solution, O’Neil emphasized that

the U.S. must strengthen democracy in Mexico, namely by

supporting the growing Mexican middle class. Americans

want the border area to be stable and secure. Pouring funds

into military hardware might achieve this objective in the

short term, but for sustained peace, the border area and

other urban centers must provide economic opportunities

for Mexico’s working people. Moreover, no amount of

money will be able to solve Mexico’s security dilemma

without the support of ordinary citizens.

Amalia García Medina, Governor of Zacatecas,

agreed with O’Neil that security is a shared challenge

for both countries. However, she argued that Americans

need to acknowledge the many factors that brought

Mexico to this crisis point. The U.S. is, after all, the

world’s largest consumer market for illegal drugs. By

virtue of its geography, Mexico is a natural location for

producers and traffickers.

The consequences of geography have been

compounded by globalization and the worldwide

economic crisis. Since the passage of Nafta, Mexican corn

farmers have been hit hard by cheap imports at home and

crop subsidies that protect markets abroad. Declining

corn prices have made cultivating marijuana a tempting

alternative. The recent economic crisis has also increased

the pull of the illegal economy. As of September 2009,

there were almost 800,000 newly unemployed persons

in Mexico, all needing to find a way to make a living.

García Medina stressed that these dynamics give Mexican

farming families a terrible choice: suffer the economic

vicissitudes of the legal agricultural markets or cultivate

economically viable but illegal drug crops.

Complicating this situation is the undeniable fact that

corruption exists, not just within Mexico but also at the

U.S. border. Within the past few years, Mexican cartels have

amassed great power, and 90 percent of their weapons >>

Soldiers arrest municipal police in Nuevo Léon, November 2009.

Phot

o by

Juan

Car

los

Rey

es G

arcí

a/A

FP/G

etty

Imag

es.


34 Silver or Lead

come from the United States. But, García Medina stressed,

we must ask ourselves how this occurs. To illustrate her

point, she recounted how she had once mistakenly packed

a travel sewing kit in her carry-on bag for a fl ight from

the U.S. to Mexico. Her kit, with its small needle, was

confi scated as a potential security threat. This incident

demonstrates that careful vigilance is clearly possible —

and yet there are 11,000 points along the U.S.–Mexico

border where weapons of war cross every day. How is it that

a tiny sewing needle is caught and confi scated but bazookas

and AK-47s pass through undetected? Mexico clearly has a

corruption problem, but the U.S. must admit that corruption

exists on its side of the border as well. Without it, this level

of weapons traffi cking would not exist.

García Medina concluded that in order to address

Mexico’s security crisis, a highly trained and well-equipped

police force is needed. However, she added, Mexicans also

need to change their society from within. Every day, young

people enter the criminal life. To counter this, families must

teach children self-respect, solidarity and responsibility,

and everyone should watch out for each other. At the same

time, the Mexican government should reinforce these

values. To this end, she questioned why Mérida Initiative

funds are directed toward weapons and military training

but not education, health care or productive community

projects. In order to prevent criminal activity, people —

especially youth — must be enabled to envision a future

with dignity. That is the way out of the security crisis, for

both countries, she maintained.

On the whole, O’Neil’s and García Medina’s remarks

touched on complementary themes. The U.S. should secure

the border while simultaneously heightening efforts to

strengthen Mexico’s democratic institutions and support

the emerging middle class. For its part, Mexico needs

to combat pervasive corruption — but the U.S. should

also admit that corruption exists north of the border as

well. Reducing the demand for illegal drugs in the U.S. is

another component of the solution.

These are broad, long-term goals. Few would argue

that they are not worthwhile, but what do they mean in

practice? The real work lies in translating desirable ideals

like these into feasible policy solutions. The roundtable’s

assembled guests took up this challenge and debated the

merits and limitations of specifi c courses of action for over

an hour.

Some individuals questioned whether or not Mexican

security is at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. Silvano

Aureoles Conejo, a senator from Michoacán, affi rmed

that Mexico is doing its part, but the U.S. needs to share

responsibility as well. It’s not enough for Mexican violence

to make the nightly news; elected offi cials must give

sustained policy attention to security concerns. Ana Paula

Ordorica, a Mexican political analyst, reinforced this view

asking, “What evidence do we have that Mexico is central to

American foreign policy?” O’Neil responded that Mexico

has risen to the forefront of President Obama’s attention,

sharing front-page status with Afghanistan and Iraq on the

president’s daily foreign policy memo. The question is not

whether Mexico has the United States’ attention in terms

of security — it clearly does. The challenge is that the

discussion has not broadened beyond securing the border.

Alex Saragoza, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC

Berkeley, concurred that a paradigm shift in Washington

is crucial. Whenever the U.S. media reports on Mexico,

Americans hear about problems “over there” — from

drugs to travel advisories to the H1N1 virus. And, in his

view, the Mérida Initiative reinforces this perception.

Funding is dedicated almost entirely to solving the crisis

“over there” in Mexico. Few resources are earmarked for

addressing issues within the U.S. that contribute to the

problem, namely reducing the demand for illegal drugs.

David Bonior, Chair of American Rights at Work and

former U.S. Congressional Representative for Michigan’s

10th district, expanded on this issue, drawing out two

practical implications. First, the way to decrease demand

is to reduce the number of drug users in the United

States, which means targeting hard-core addicts for

rehabilitation. O’Neil agreed, citing research from the U.S.

National Drug Control Strategy group which found that

while hard-core addicts comprise only about 20 percent

of American drug users, they consume 70 percent of all

illegal drugs. Rehabilitating these chronic users would

signifi cantly reduce the demand for drugs in the United

States. However California State Senator Gilbert Cedillo

reminded the group that drug rehabilitation initiatives

have never been politically popular. Getting measures like

these through the policy-making process would require a

broad coalition. He suggested that one way to meet this

challenge might be to bring doctors on board and to frame

the issue in terms of ensuring public health.

Bonior also stressed that the U.S. needs to control

the trafficking of firearms. There are already laws in

place to prevent individuals with arrest records from

purchasing guns. However, gangs have begun recruiting

young women with clean records as purchasers, drawing

previously uninvolved individuals into criminal activity.

What would stronger controls on weapons trafficking

look like, and would it be politically possible to enact

them in the United States? Rafael Fernández de Castro,

Presidential Advisor for International Affairs and



Competitiveness in Mexico, asked the members of the

U.S. Congress present: “Is it impossible to enact a law

banning assault weapons in the United States?” The

perception in Mexico is that this policy would be highly

effective in reducing international weapons trafficking

but that it is a political impossibility due to the strength

of the American gun rights lobby.

In response, Bob Filner, a member of Congress

representing California’s 51st district, said that such a ban

is possible, and the U.S. should try to enact one. While

he acknowledged that this is a politically sensitive issue,

Filner also claimed that there is sufficient support in the

House. If President Obama took up this issue, it might get

through the Senate as well.

Up until this point, the discussion on how the U.S.

can take responsibility for its share of the security crisis

had centered around two specific policies: providing

treatment for hardcore drug addicts to reduce demand

and enacting stronger controls on cross-border weapons

trafficking. Within this conversation, Isaac Katz,

Professor of Economics at the Instituto Tecnológico

Autónomo de México, observed that the discussion so

far had overlooked a crucial point: Mexican cartels exist

because the drug trade is profitable. The root of the

security problems that both countries face can be traced

to the Mexican cartels’ extraordinarily high revenues,

which he estimated to be $30 billion per year. The

“paradox of the war on drugs,” Katz claimed, is that “the

more resources you put into fighting drug cartels, the

more profitable the activity becomes.” Decreasing U.S.

demand and tightening gun control laws are components

of an overall security strategy, but, Katz argued, “as long

as we don’t discuss the legalization of drug production,

drug trafficking and drug consumption, there will be

these security issues again and again and again.” As a first

step, part of the solution would be to strengthen Mexico’s

financial system to prevent the cartels from laundering

their profits with impunity.

With this comment, the participants began to discuss

the practical challenges involved in strengthening Mexican

institutions. Juan Ernesto Pardinas — a consultant

for the Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad, a

Mexican policy research group — shared Professor Katz’s

concerns. Taking the challenge of institution-building

a step further, Pardinas claimed that reforming the

Mexican municipal police is crucial.

Municipal police forces were designed in the 19th

century, and their structure has remained unchanged to >>

A Texas gun store manager poses with her wares.

Phot

o by

Gill

es M

inga

sson

/Get

ty Im

ages

.


36 Silver or Lead

the present day. As a result, they are unable to confront

21st-century threats. Over the past year, municipal forces

in 22 states have engaged in shootouts, not with the drug

traffi ckers, but with federal police forces. Why do local-

level offi cials protect drug kingpins and cartel members?

The municipal police live in the very neighborhoods that

they protect. In the United States, this might be seen as

an advantage, but within the context of cartel violence,

it is a liability. Drug traffi ckers know where families live,

where children attend school. Faced with these personal

threats, municipal police fi nd themselves protecting the

traffi ckers’ interests instead of those of the state. Pardinas

explained that Mexicans describe the situation as one of

“plata o plomo” (silver or lead). Cooperation is rewarded

with payment while standing in the way of the traffi ckers’

interests results in a bullet for yourself or your family.

García Medina responded to the issues that Katz

and Pardinas raised, stating that efforts are in place to

strengthen the rule of law and reform the municipal

police. For example, some states are currently reforming

their penal codes so that people can receive timely

access to justice. However, she agreed that reforming the

municipal police force is a difficult challenge. Municipal

police officers tend to have little education and low

salaries, so they are in no position to stand up to the

cartels. She suggested that state governments should

collaborate with the federal government to coordinate

their response, possibly meeting weekly in each state.

Pardinas countered that within his state of Monterrey,

increased coordination efforts among the three armed

forces have been attempted for years, with few positive

results. The essential issue is that municipal police whose

families are threatened by the cartels will never prioritize

the interests of the state over protecting their loved ones.

For this reason, Mexican state or federal police should

relieve the municipal police forces of their front-line

responsibilities. Responding to cartel violence should be

addressed at the federal level.

And yet, O’Neil replied, federal armed forces

are not well suited to internal policing efforts in any

country. Militaries are generally not trained in domestic

policing, nor should they be — these efforts are outside

the scope of their proper role. In response, Fernández

de Castro stressed that coordination remains essential.

Perhaps the emphasis should shift toward ensuring

better information sharing between the U.S. and

Mexico. Government agencies naturally tend to protect

their intelligence, but in order to combat the cartels,

information needs to f low at least as freely across the

border as drugs and weapons do.

At this point, Ordorica asked García Medina

to comment on the feasibility of funding broader

educational and social initiatives within Mexico.

Specifically, if Mérida Initiative funds were channeled

toward particular community projects, would Mexican

elected officials view this as intruding on their sphere

of inf luence? García Medina prefaced her answer by

clarifying that she would respond not as a state governor

or a party representative, but just as a Mexican citizen.

With that, she noted that the U.S. has been funding

educational initiatives in Mexico for many years. In

her home state of Zacatecas, this funding has been very

well received, and it is producing positive results. For

example, Carnegie Mellon University has partnered with

Mexican secondary schools to teach students software

development. In January 2010, this program was expanded

to introduce elementary students to the field of robotics.

Initiatives like these are fundamentally connected to

security concerns because they not only encourage youth

to envision a positive future, they provide them with the

tools and opportunities that they need to get there. With

practical skills and job opportunities waiting for them,

youth will be better able to resist the lure of the cartels.

With the time for discussion rapidly coming to a

close, Pete Gallego, a state representative from Texas,

observed that public support is critical for any of

these proposed policy solutions to succeed. Clearly,

the problem cannot be solved through military efforts

alone. Community initiatives, reducing corruption

on both sides of the border, strengthening democratic

institutions and rehabilitating hard-core drug users are

all part of the solution, yet most citizens don’t connect

these issues with enhanced security. The challenge going

forward is to gain public awareness and support.

This session of the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum

resulted in a thorough and lively discussion that explored

the merits and limitations of specific policy solutions

to the security crisis. Although the participants did not

reach consensus on every issue, one element is clear: the

time for focusing on short-term security efforts is over.

Relations between Mexico and the U.S. can no longer be

“You have to be strategic about your resources… your state will be overwhelmed if you try to incarcerate… your way out of this problem.”— Gil Cedillo, State Senator, California



based on funding for weapons and military incursions

alone. Doing so allows the drug cartels to set the agenda

and does little to ensure results over the long term.

The Mexican state is not failing, but its institutions,

particularly the rule of law, are weak. Reforming the

municipal police so that they are protected from cartel

threats is a key part of the solution. In addition, broader

social initiatives to support economic opportunities for

the middle class and education for youth will serve to

strengthen democracy in Mexico. Cartels find it difficult

to operate when democratic institutions are strong.

U.S. funding for the Mérida Initiative is welcome

and necessary. No security strategy would be complete

without basic military efforts to secure the border area.

However, security solutions cannot and must not stop

there. The U.S. needs to address the corruption within

its own ranks that allows illegal weapons to enter Mexico

unchecked. Rehabilitating hardcore drug users, though

politically difficult to implement, would do much to

reduce drug demand, thus making the drug trade less

profitable for the cartels.

Not all of these policy prescriptions can be easily

enacted, but some of them must nevertheless go forward.

The current economic crisis has demonstrated once

again that the world is increasingly interconnected, and

security is no exception. As partners and neighbors,

Mexico and the U.S. must accept shared responsibility

for the security crisis and move forward with a common

agenda focused on long-term solutions.

The Security Panel was a session of the U.S.–Mexico Futures Forum held at UC Berkeley on August 23-25, 2009. The presenters included Amalia García Medina, Governor of Zacatecas, and Shannon O’Neil, the Douglas Dillon Fellow for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Wendy Muse Sinek is a Visiting Instructor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

A vigil against violence in Mexico.

Phot

o by

Ed

Car

si.


38 The Bachelet Bounce

M ichelle Bachelet’s place in Latin America’s

history books is assured. When she was sworn

into office on March 11, 2006, she became

Chile’s first female president and the first popularly

elected Latin American woman president who did not

follow a politically prominent husband into office.

Equally remarkable was the success and stability of the

coalition that she led to a fourth consecutive victory.

Since her election, Michelle Bachelet has become the

most popular president in Chile’s history, at least since

opinion polls began to ask the question. Recently, her

approval ratings have approached or surpassed the 80

percent mark in all opinion surveys. Chile’s most reliable

survey, run by the Centro de Estudios Públicos (Center

for Public Studies, CEP) registered a 78 percent approval

rate in October 2009.

Furthermore, this halo of political magic surrounds

not only the president herself, but also her government.

According to an October 2009 CEP survey, 69 percent

approve of how the Bachelet government is managing

the economy. Andrés Velasco is the most popular finance

minister (normally a thankless task) that the country

has ever had. And though the general approval ratings of

her government are more disperse, they are far superior

to those of the opposition coalition (41 percent vs. 27

percent, CEP).

During the early years of the Bachelet administration,

I wrote a critical article in this publication that compared

her government to Goethe’s poem about the sorcerer’s

apprentice, who lost control of the spinning brooms and

could not rein in the fl oods that threatened to drown him.

Now, however, towards the end of Bachelet’s four-year

presidential term, it seems that no apprentice has ever been

so successful at turning herself into a powerful sorcerer,

The Bachelet Bounceby Kirsten Sehnbruch

CHILE

President Michelle Bachelet on Chilean Independence Day, September 2009.

Photo by Alex E. Proim

os.



with record approval ratings in the face of an economic

crisis, a high unemployment rate and an election defeat.

This begs several questions: How did President

Bachelet achieve this feat? What did her government do

for Chile? And why was the Concertación defeated in

the January 19, 2010, presidential elections? (See “Chile

Heads Right” on page 2 of this issue).

The years since 2006 have indeed been a rollercoaster

ride for Michelle Bachelet. After the upbeat emotion

surrounding her election triumph, she immediately faced

a series of crises, including massive student protests,

corruption scandals, labor unrest, internal governmental

divisions and defections of political allies from the coalition

parties, leading to the loss of her Senate majority. Worst

of all, the major reorganization of Santiago’s transport

system, known as the Transantiago Plan, went horribly

wrong, leaving 6 million people stranded and facing

appalling transportation conditions. The allegations of

ineptitude and wrongdoing surrounding the Transantiago

debacle led to a serious and sustained political crisis in

the Concertación and cost the Bachelet administration

political capital in its fi rst year of government.

The initial responses of Bachelet’s ministers and of

the president herself to these crises were widely criticized.

Frequent cabinet changes and lack of coordination among

different ministers gave the impression that the president

lacked leadership and that the government was adrift.

There were even publicly voiced doubts about whether

a woman could govern Chile. By December 2007, the

president’s approval ratings had fallen to historic lows.

However, the turnaround in Bachelet’s fortunes

in early 2009 was equally remarkable. It seems that

the worldwide economic recession turned into an

opportunity for the Bachelet government, mostly thanks

to her administration’s management of the economy.

Instead of spending windfall profits from high

copper prices, her minister of finance, Andrés Velasco,

accumulated reserves in a sovereign wealth fund outside

of Chile and paid down the national debt, resisting

intense political pressure to tap into these reserves. When

>>

The Radomiro Tomic copper mine in Antofagasta, Chile.

Phot

o by

Mat

t H

ints

a.


40 The Bachelet Bounce

the 2009 worldwide economic crisis

hit, Velasco was able to put together a

comprehensive stimulus package that

kept Chile from experiencing as deep

a crisis as other countries around the

world. Ironically, therefore, President

Bachelet’s popularity took off just

as the country slid into a brief and

slight recession. Simultaneously, the

pension reform that the Bachelet

administration had instituted during

the early years of her government

supported household incomes as it

increased elderly citizens’ access to

pensions that doubled the amounts to

which they were previously entitled.

Opinion polls give testimony

to how extraordinarily well the

economic crisis was managed

in Chile. Despite relatively high

unemployment rates, the vast

majority of Chileans did not

expect their economic situation to

deteriorate during the next year.

However, none of these

developments alone can explain

President Bachelet’s stellar approval

ratings. While it is still too early to

judge her political legacy, there is no

doubt that her options were limited

by a newly shortened presidential

term. Many challenges remain:

electoral reform; constitutional

reform; and reform of the political,

social and economic structures that

the Concertación inherited from

the dictatorship. Nevertheless, the

Bachelet administration has achieved

profound shifts, particularly in the

area of social policy.

The pension reform, for

example, establishes a minimum

standard of social security. In a

country of stark inequalities, this is

no mean feat. Moreover, the pension

reform has been accompanied

by a series of other social policy

measures, such as the expansion of

national health insurance services

and the extension of childcare and

unemployment benefits, which have

established minimum guarantees of

services for all Chileans. Although

this policy was initiated during

the Lagos administration with a

comprehensive health insurance

reform (a period during which

President Bachelet was minister of

health), her administration expand-

ed this strategy to form what could

be considered the basic structure

of a welfare state. In particular, the

expansion of benefits beyond the

poorest segments of the population

to include the burgeoning middle

classes constitutes a significant step

in an economy that until now had

focused all its efforts on targeting

only the poor, in line with the classic

development models proposed by

the Washington institutions during

the 1990s.

Combined with her charismatic

leadership and a political discourse (as

well as specifi c measures) empowering

women, the social policies of President

Bachelet will form her historical

legacy. She has succeeded in instilling

a sense of entitlement among those

excluded from Chile’s largely private

provision of social insurance, which

has empowered the electorate.

Seventy-eight percent of Chileans approved of President Bachelet’s government.(Data from Centro de Estudios Públicos, Encuesta Nacional de Opinión Pública, October 2009).

Chileans expressed confi dence in their economic future and government economic policies.(Data from Centro de Estudios Públicos, Encuesta Nacional de Opinión Pública, October 2009).



Indeed, the fact that the Concertación lost the

January presidential elections may, in part, be

attributable to this success. The same electorate

that enjoyed increased benefits also sought more

opportunities and blamed the Concertación for the

persistant inequalities that mark Chile. The profound

shift that President Bachelet has achieved in terms of how

the population thinks about social security was visible

in the election discourse of the opposition’s candidate,

Sebastián Piñera. After 20 years of voting against the

most progressive elements of the Concertación’s proposed

social reforms, Piñera had to promise further progress on

social issues.

Above all though, President Bachelet’s most power-

ful legacy, and the outstanding achievement that will

guarantee her place in the annals of history, is that she

has been by far the most successful female president

in Latin America. She will be remembered as a strong,

caring leader with an impressive record of laying down

the foundations of social change that focused on women,

not just symbolically by establishing Latin America’s

first gender paritarian cabinet, but also practically, by

providing women with more options in their lives and a

greater sense of empowerment. Perhaps the best summary

of her legacy is the assertive statement of Amparo García

Oliva, the seven-year-old daughter of a friend of mine:

“When I grow up, I want to be president of Chile.”

Kirsten Sehnbruch is a professor of Public Policy at the Instituto de Asuntos Publicos, Universidad de Chile.

President Bachelet visits with benefi ciaries of the “Chile Grows With You” program.

Phot

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Mar

celo

a A

gost

/ww

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42 Culture and Politics in the Honduran Coup

On June 28, 2009, the elected civilian government of

Honduras was overthrown by a military coup. In

the wake of this event, Honduran citizens began

demonstrations that continued despite constant threat of

arrest, suspension of the rights of free speech and assembly

and arbitrary imposition of curfews. The day after the

coup, I started a blog that continues to provide access to

Honduran scholars’ analyses of the political situation as

well as contextual information about a country that has

been virtually ignored in the United States since the end of

the Contra War against Nicaragua.

How did an archaeologist fi nd herself caught up in the

aftermath of a coup? Described by the U.S. mainstream

media as a confl ict about presidential term limits, the coup

was actually a response to the profound implications of

broader policies. For the fi rst time in modern Honduran

history, there was a call for broad citizen participation, even

in the realm of cultural heritage where I work.

The Making of a Coup In my three decades working in Honduras, I have

learned that election years are always tense, but the

bitterness of 2009 was unprecedented. Honduran

newspapers, never a source of particularly reliable

information, turned into propaganda machines directed

against the president for his alleged intention to remain

in office beyond the end of his term.

The basis for these claims was the nonbinding opinion

poll that President Zelaya had scheduled for June 28. The

single question to be asked in the referendum read, “Are

you in favor of having a question on the November ballot

that would ask if people want to convene a constitutional

assembly?” I personally saw the poll as entirely symbolic

since it would be up to Congress, whose members were

among the poll’s fiercest critics, to propose any binding

referendum for the November ballot.

However, the prospect that poll results would

Culture and Politics in the Honduran Coupby Rosemary Joyce

HONDURAS Police and protestors in Honduras, July 2009.

Photo by Sandra Cuffe.



demonstrate the true level of

dissatisfaction with the present

form of Honduran government

was apparently too threatening to

allow. Researchers for the Latin

American Public Opinion Project

had already documented widespread

disillusion in Honduras, not just

with a specifi c government, but also

with government in general. In a

2008 comparative study, they found

that among all Latin Americans,

Hondurans were the most dissatisfi ed

with their government.

Citizens’ longstanding resig-

nation to enduring poverty and

corruption had turned into a

profound sense of alienation.

Participation rates dropped below

50 percent in the 2005 congressional

election. Participation in the

presidential election held that same

year was signifi cantly higher, with 55

percent of those eligible casting a vote.

Thus, while President Zelaya entered

offi ce with less than a majority, a

larger proportion of the Honduran

electorate seemed to feel it was worth

their time to vote for president than

for Congress, where no term limits

exist and politicians consolidate

power and remain for decades.

Zelaya took office in 2006, during

a time of rising oil prices. Honduras,

which has no domestic supply, is

particularly vulnerable to swings in

the oil market. The new president

acted almost immediately to secure

alternative sources of petroleum,

joining Venezuela’s Petrocaribe

initiative, a maneuver that is

commonly, if misleadingly, glossed

as the start of his “move to the left.”

Analyses by Honduran economists

like Miguel Cáceres Rivera suggest

this decision was pragmatic, not

ideological. Venezuela took 50

percent payment on an already

low price for oil, financed the

remainder for 25 years at 1 percent

interest, would accept payment in

kind in lieu of cash and would loan

back much of the cash paid for use

in development projects.

Reining in oil prices, along with

a reform of the banking system that

lowered interest rates from roughly

27 percent to around 11 percent,

helped stabilize the Honduran

economy. During Zelaya’s presidency,

the national currency, the lempira,

maintained its value for the fi rst time

in 20 years. But as Cáceres Rivera

explained, the more globalized the

business, the more the Honduran

business community had to gain by

resisting economic reforms. As long

as the cost of labor in Honduras

remained low, the profi t from

international sales of Honduran

products went up. Confrontation

increased between Zelaya’s govern-

ment and the network of business,

media and political interests that had

grown in the 1990s to unite previously

separate commercial and political

elites. In the autumn of 2008, when

Zelaya faced a mandate to establish

wages for government employees, he

increased the minimum wage by 60

percent. While this baseline wage

still did not cover minimum food

costs for a typical family, the dramatic

rise was enough to bring about a

revolt by the business community.

Some commentators have suggested

the action was politically motivated,

noting that Zelaya’s popularity

increased sharply in the quarter

following the increase.

It was against this backdrop

that Zelaya decided to push for the

public opinion poll on convening

a constitutional convention. While

opponents immediately charged that

his sole concern was to lift restrictions

on reelection, the promotional

material for the poll emphasized

political reforms, including the

recall and censure of politicians and

the election of Congress members

by localized districts. Beyond

the basics of public participation

in government, the campaign

materials mention guarantees of

the rights of women and ethnic and

racial minorities. It was this aspect

of Zelaya’s agenda that made work

on cultural heritage, including

archaeology, politically dangerous.>>

Signs protesting the coup government’s interference in research.

Phot

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History Is Dangerous In late August, protestors disrupted a lecture about

Copán in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second largest city.

This Classic Maya archeological site was the fi rst Unesco

World Cultural Heritage Site in Honduras and remains the

country’s only cultural World Heritage Site. The protestors

carried signs demanding: “No to exclusive cultural policies”

and “Yes to the democratization of culture.” A third reading

“No to the mayanization of Honduran Culture” began to

make clear why an archaeological talk was an appropriate

place for political action against the coup.

“Mayanization” is a term coined by Honduran historian

Darío Euraque, at the time the head of the Honduran

Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) and himself

under threat of dismissal by the de facto regime. Euraque

has argued that cultural differences across prehispanic

Honduras were erased and replaced by a single history of the

Classic Maya, a civilization portrayed as having disappeared

long ago. Mayanization thus renders invisible the indigenous

groups still living in Honduran territory. The Classic Maya

may have disappeared from Copán, but their Chorti Maya

descendants remain and make demands for control of their

land and of representations of their history, including that

part recorded in inscriptions at Copán using grammar

specifi c to Chorti. The Lenca language was declared dead

by researchers in the 1970s, but the Lenca living throughout

central and southern Honduras remain and today demand

to know how they are related to the people who built the

20-meter-tall pyramid of Yarumela around 700 BC. The

Mosquitia region in the eastern part of the country never

was fully integrated into the Spanish colony of Honduras

and guarded knowledge of large precolumbian settlements

only revealed to archaeologists starting in the 1980s.

I do not work at Copán, however, nor in the

Mosquitia or near any of the Lenca communities of

Central and Southern Honduras. I have spent my

career documenting archaeological traces in the fertile

Ulua river valley, near San Pedro Sula. The region

began experiencing explosive population growth and

economic development in the late 1960s, and the city’s

rapid expansion led to the IHAH’s 1977 decision to begin

constructing a baseline inventory of archaeological sites

in the face of their impending destruction.

But that was then, and this is now. Another sign at the

August protest read: “No to the cancellation of archaeo-

logical projects outside Copán.”

While the poster did not specify which projects were

being cancelled, it carried an image drawn from an object

excavated under the direction of a recent Berkeley Ph.D.:

the logo of Currusté, an archaeological park inaugurated

in early 2009. Located within the municipal boundaries

of San Pedro Sula, the Currusté project was a product of

policies put in place by the Ministry of Culture and the

Institute of Anthropology under the Zelaya administration,

calling for greater public participation in all government-

sponsored work. As public participatory research, the

project was not just a dig but a collaboration. It was this

policy of grounding research in public participation that

made history dangerous.

Archaeology Matters My own research project under the Zelaya

administration explored forgotten histories of race

in north-coast Honduras through archaeological and

historical anthropological research. It focused on

contemporary Omoa, the site of a prehispanic indigenous

town as well as the 18th-century Spanish colonial fort San

Fernando de Omoa, built to defend the colony against the

British and their Miskito allies.

During Zelaya’s presidency, the IHAH had its own

goals for research and prioritized its support of projects

according to their advancement of those goals. Its priorities

included a clear sense that the Institute needed to develop

projects in every part of the country in order to encourage

public participation in historical research. Archaeological

work was urgently pressed in places where the Institute

had the opportunity to develop public parks, for the fi rst

time targeting local audiences, especially near cities like

San Pedro Sula. Our proposal for work in the town of

Omoa was given the go-ahead because it contributed to

the Institute’s larger goal of building a new museum. This

museum project, suspended after the coup, would have

developed new historical themes for public presentation,

bridging the gap that exists between townspeople and the

international tourists visiting San Fernando de Omoa.

Omoa was of interest to us because documents

from archives in Spain and Guatemala showed that

the 18th-century community was internally complex.

Distant indigenous towns provided labor for the initial

construction of the fort, as did contingents of enslaved

Africans owned by the Spanish Crown. Once the fort

was built, people from the indigenous towns of the Ulua

River valley continued to provide labor in Omoa. There

was also a population of what were called “free blacks” —

African-descendant people who had escaped enslavement

in British-controlled territory — working under the >>

Right: Stela H depicts the 13th ruler of Copán.(Photo by Rob Verhoeven.)



orders of the Commander of the Fort and enjoying an

unprecedented degree of liberty. Omoa, we believed,

would offer us the opportunity to explore a colonial

community where the multiracial and multiethnic

population of contemporary north-coast Honduras was

forged. We hoped that it would allow us to understand how

this historic complexity of population was forgotten.

For most of June 2009, our group from UC Berkeley

excavated areas in the yard of the present museum.

Located in a historic building, the museum was once

the headquarters of the Cuyamel Fruit Company and

later became the intake center for prisoners condemned

to the repurposed colonial fort; San Fernando de Omoa

was formally designated a penitentiary in 1910. Historical

memory of the prison is how people in the modern town

and along much of the north coast personally relate to

Omoa. When the fort became a national historic site in

the 1970s, these connections were obscured in favor of a

history of pirates of the Caribbean.

In addition to our excavation work, we also served as

part of the scholarly writing committee for a new Omoa

museum that was to contain a reinterpretation of the site.

The old historic building was to be preserved for offi ces

and study space, and the new museum would locate that

building in a continuing history of place at Omoa. Our

fi nds in the summers of 2008 and 2009 would contribute

to the presentation of a history of occupation of the fort

and town that neither began with the completion of the

fi rst version of the fortress, El Real, in about 1753, nor

ended with independence in 1821. The history of the fort

would be brought up to the present through work with

local people considered to be community historians. In

2009, we recorded gravestones in the historic cemetery that

reoccupied El Real after its abandonment, based on the

urgings of community members in a public forum in 2008.

Under the cultural policies of the Zelaya

administration, our work explicitly involved community

participation. In 2008, these efforts included public

forums held at the museum and systematic interviews of

community members about what they felt were important

historic questions. In 2009, we held weekend workshops

as part of a nationwide program in which hundreds of

Hondurans — from high school students to teachers to

workers in the tourism sector — attended scholar-led

tours of historic sites and received reading materials about

Honduran history to which they would never have had

access otherwise. The purpose of these workshops was

not simply one-way transmission of information; rather,

participants were taught techniques that they could use to

create, in the words of Dr. Euraque, “textured histories”

from their locally rooted perspectives and thereby

contribute to the historic narrative of modern Honduras.

San Fernando de Omoa.

Photo by Will K

linger.



Connecting Cultural Policy and the Coup Our project came to a halt in the wake of the coup

due to the end of international funding, the dismissal

of Dr. Euraque and our own decision that continuing

to work under the de facto regime would be, in a small

way, to legitimate it. Myrna Castro, the newly appointed

minister of culture, lost no time in opposing programs

encouraging public participation in local history; she even

denounced book distribution programs on the grounds

that the recipients — rural farmers and indigenous and

African-descendant people — were “vulnerable” to the

supposedly subversive ideas they contained.

At the IHAH, Castro decried attempts to develop a

broader range of archaeological parks as evidence of a

lack of attention to Copán. She defined the Institute’s

mission as increasing tourism rather than developing

knowledge of the Honduran past, as legally mandated.

As if to underline the class interests that drove the coup,

she chose to invest Institute funds in fashion shows,

declaring, “Fashion is an industry, but it is also part of

the culture of the people.”

Those who would reduce the complex Honduran past

to a simple, saleable narrative in which a now-vanished

Maya state dominated the land, found the cultural

research encouraged by the Zelaya administration not

just superf luous but threatening. Rather than equating

culture with consumption, the work we were doing

placed an emphasis on the ways in which communities

can create meaningful connections with the past. By

putting the work of interpreting the national story in the

hands of local communities, projects like ours were part

of a move to empower the Honduran people. And that, in

the end, is what the elite found intolerable.

Rosemary Joyce is a professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and has conducted archeological fi eldwork in Honduras since 1977. To read her blog on the Honduran coup,go to http://hondurascoup2009.blogspot.com/.

Berkeley doctoral candidate Doris Maldonado discusses the Currusté archaeological project with community members and Berkeley undergraduates.

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48

“Andar por la calle ya no es confi able… ¿Cuántos inocentes seguirán cayendo?”“On the streets it’s not safe for us to walk… How many more innocents will fall?”— Antonio Zúñiga Rodríguez

When Antonio “Toño” Zúñiga raps at the end of

the new documentary “Presumed Guilty” that

it’s not safe to walk his streets in Mexico City, it’s

not for fear of pickpockets, kidnappers, gunshots or gangs.

“Ahora ya no queda cuidarse de la lacra; ahora hay que cuidarse de un ofi cial con placa.”“Now we’re not so wary of the bad guys; now we’re careful of the offi cer with a badge.”

It’s the police, he warns, who are making the streets

unsafe. Zúñiga speaks from experience: he spent more

than three years in a Mexico City prison for a murder he

did not commit.

Presumed Guilty:Based on an Untrue Storyby Mary Ellen Sanger

FILMWaiting behing the bars of a Mexican prison.

(Photo courtesy of Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete.)



Two young Mexican lawyers have made it their mission

to take on the system that incarcerates innocents like

Zúñiga. Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete, who call

themselves “lawyers with cameras,” are a married couple

whose effervescent charm belies their serious purpose. As

they work toward their doctorates in Public Policy at UC

Berkeley, they advocate for the fi lming of criminal court

proceedings in Mexico, believing that cameras can be a

tool for bringing transparency to the courts.

Their first-of-its-kind filming of Zúñiga’s case

resulted in the chilling documentary, “Presumed Guilty,”

which presents in gripping detail the harsh reality of

Mexico’s trial system that is responsible for the almost-

routine incarceration of innocent people. The film,

directed by Hernández and award-winning documentary

filmmaker Geoffrey Smith, made its world premier in

September 2009 at the prestigious Toronto International

Film Festival. It went on to win top recognition at

the Morelia Film Fest and the Amnesty Award at the

Copenhagen International Documentary Festival. The

hair-raising footage of court proceedings seems artfully

scripted for dramatic effect, but unfortunately it is all too

real. At a recent public screening in Mexico, the crowd

was up in arms, screaming at the judge on the screen,

kicking the f loor and gesturing angrily.

“We didn’t actually realize we were making a film,”

Hernández says, “until we found out we could get a retrial

for Toño.”

Zúñiga was already in jail and sentenced to 20 years

when Hernández and Negrete met him. On December

12, 2005, police officers grabbed Zúñiga off the street,

handcuffed him and threw him in prison. His accuser

was a minor who had previously been a suspect. “He’s the

one” and a point of the finger. That’s all it took. Zúñiga

and the young man who accused him had never met.

There was no arrest warrant. No evidence. The witnesses

who had seen him 20 minutes away from the crime scene

at the time of the murder appeared as handwritten names

in a file of written reports and testimonies four inches

thick and sewn together with twine. Zúñiga’s file was

just one in a mountain of similar files in an archive room

of the court. Nobody followed up. Why bother? He was

already presumed guilty.

It’s an all-too-common story in Mexico, where

police are paid bonuses for the number of arrests they

make. Though the right to a fair trial has long been

constitutional, it is only since 2008 that “fair” has

been defined specifically to include the presumption of

innocence and an oral trial. Currently, trials are held

with or without a judge present (usually without), with

or without witnesses present (usually without) and with

or without real evidence or an attorney for the defense.

Sheaves of paper are pushed back and forth across desks

for signatures and stamped in triplicate. Defendants

are often convicted without ever seeing the judge who

sentenced them. This assembly line operation only

very narrowly fits any definition of justice, as clerks,

prosecutors, secretaries and judges “just do their jobs”

within a dehumanizing system.

Getting camera teams inside that system is no small

feat. While Mexicans have a constitutional right to a public

trial, in reality everything happens behind closed doors.

Hernández and Negrete use the Constitution to negotiate

access to trial proceedings. “This is a constitutional right,

but there has been no precedent,” Negrete explains. “In

general, a trial is so difficult to understand that almost

nobody is even interested. Of course, the media has been

in hearings, and they show images of people facing a trial,

but they’ve never assembled the whole trial.”

Because the trials are so difficult to understand,

even for lawyers like Negrete and Hernández, they

found that cameras gave them the chance to better

follow the proceedings.

“We get clarity from the cameras,” Hernández says.

“Without the cameras, you don’t know who’s who, what’s

what, what’s the theory about the case, what are they

trying to prove. There is no opening argument. You can’t

hear anything; you don’t understand. It’s clearer in the

film. I only found out certain things had happened when

I was checking the footage.”

The film shows Zúñiga standing in a poorly lit

area, face pressed up against the bars that separate and

brand him, struggling to understand the convoluted

proceedings. The high-pitched drone of ink-jet printers

competes with the scraping of chairs on the tile f loor

and the echo of legal banter — each word repeated by

the judge for proper recording by the secretary. Zúñiga’s

family and friends are present in the background, kept at

bay by a four-foot wall.

While Zúñiga’s trial seems impersonal, he actually

receives better-than-average treatment because of

the presence of cameras. Normally, he would be tried

simultaneously with up to 12 other defendants. It wouldn’t

be “the Zúñiga trial,” it would be the “criminal trial of the

day.” In front of the cameras, the judge — not generally

present so there isn’t a designated space for him — stands

through the entire proceedings, even wearing his robes.

The prosecutor is also dressed professionally. Witnesses >>


50

for the prosecution are actually produced, though they

testify only by not remembering the answers to any of the

questions posed by the defense attorney.

“Toño is an everyday guy,” Hernández says,

explaining why they decided to make a documentary

of his legal battle. “It’s a case that’s very representative

of what anybody who is arrested by the police might

experience. It’s not a strange case, statistically.”

Negrete adds that fully 92 percent of the defendants

in Mexican courts are convicted, in most cases without

scientifi cally validated evidence. Testimonies and

depositions are accepted simply because they have been

stamped “received” and entered into the reams of paper

that make up the case.

“We were researchers. We knew what the patterns

were and what we wanted to change in the criminal justice

system: lack of presumption of innocence, the way the

system can convict without evidence, lack of professional

standards for police,” says Negrete.

“You have these courts that are willing to convict

based on anything,” her husband adds. “There is no need

to develop forensic expertise. Get whatever… say whatever.

You’ll get the conviction anyway.”

The 2008 constitutional amendment requiring the

presumption of innocence and an oral trial signals an

important opening for increased fairness. Hernández and

Negrete hope the timely release of “Presumed Guilty” will

help create enough public pressure to make sure the new

law is enforced.

“One of the things we’ve noticed is that Mexican

authorities don’t follow up very much. It’s easy

for Mexico to enact or to reform a constitution,”

Hernández muses. “José María Morelos was the first to

do it. With the Constitution of Apatzingan in 1814, we

had the right to be heard in trial and due process for

the first time. But it never got implemented, and so it

happened with the 1857 and 1917 Constitutions. They

all talked about this right to a fair trial, but nobody has

ever implemented it.”

For Negrete and Hernández, their fi lm presents a

unique opportunity to make people aware of just how

unbalanced the court system is. “It’s incredible,” Negrete

sighs. “So many Mexicans believe that we have an American

courtroom — that we have the prosecutor, the defense, the

judge and the trial. They believe that! Because they have

never been in contact with a trial.”

Presumed Guilty

The judge presides over Toño’s case.

Photo courtesy of Roberto H

ernández and Layda Negrete.



The team envisions a grassroots approach for the

distribution of “Presumed Guilty.” Their earlier short fi lm

about the justice system, “El Túnel” (“The Tunnel”), was

targeted at the political and economic elite. With their

feature-length fi lm, they hope that ordinary people will

identify with its articulate “everyman” protagonist and

begin to demand their right to a fair trial.

Hernández wants the inmates of Iztapalapa Prison,

where Zúñiga was locked up, to be among the first to

watch the film. “Because it’s incredible, they are the ones

most hurt and most vulnerable, but at the same time,

most empowered by their situation to fight it. If they

don’t fight it, nobody else can. I think they all have a

lot of fear — they are afraid if they demand anything,

they will lose. They don’t know that the odds are already

stacked against them.”

The film itself is a step toward reducing that

stack of unbalanced odds. The product of an unlikely

collaboration between the brave and vulnerable Zúñiga

and a pair of relatively privileged lawyers who chose not

to ignore his call for help, “Presumed Guilty” is already

making waves in Mexico and internationally. Negrete and

Hernández hope that the documentary created through

this rare instance of cooperation will become a tool with

the power to reform the Mexican judicial system.

Mary Ellen Sanger lived in Mexico for 17 years. In 2003, she was incarcerated for 33 days in the Oaxaca State Penitentiary on invented charges that were eventually dropped.

“Presumed Guilty,” supported by the Center for Latin American Studies, will soon be premiering in the U.S. Please see http://www.presumedguiltythemovie.com (English) or www.presuntoculpable.org (Spanish).

Toño dancing while in prison.

Phot

o co

urte

sy o

f Rob

erto

Her

nánd

ez a

nd L

ayda

Neg

rete

.


52

MamulengoBy Chico Simões

Brazil — a country known for its racially mixed cultural formations — is slowly

coming to recognize and display the vitality of its popular cultures. These are the very

cultures that the colonizing mentality, which also played a formative role in the

nation, had always opposed. Mamulengo, or traditional puppet theater, is one example

of this long-repressed cultural legacy.

Working in popular culture, and with mamulengo in particular, is a pleasure, a profession and a mission inherited from

the masters of this tradition. It is also an effective means of holding up a mirror

to the public. By identifying with the characters, their stories, their passions and their creative spirit, the spectator discovers the possibility of confronting

life with creativity and humor.

Chico Simões holds the 2009 Mario de Andrade Chair in Brazilian Culture at UC Berkeley. A puppeteer and educator

who specializes in traditional forms, Simões is the director of a Ponto de Cultura in Brasilia. He gave a presentation

of mamulengo at UC Berkeley on April 16, 2009.

“La noche está estrellada,“La noche está estrellada,

y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos”y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos”

— Pablo Neruda, “Poema 20”, — Pablo Neruda, “Poema 20”, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperadaVeinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada

Spring 2009 53


A panoramic view of the Milky Way Galaxy from El Paranal, Chile.(Photo courtesy of the European Southern Observatory.)

‘‘The night is shattered‘‘The night is shattered

and the blue stars shiver in the distance”and the blue stars shiver in the distance”

— Pablo Neruda, “Poem 20,” — Pablo Neruda, “Poem 20,” Twenty Love Poems and a Song of DespairTwenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Center for Latin American StudiesUniversity of California, Berkeley2334 Bowditch StreetBerkeley, CA 94720

clas.berkeley.edu

The telescopes of the European Southern Observatory at El Paranal, Chile. Photo courtesy of the European Southern Observatory.

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University of California

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