Pulmonia (Shadows of Mazatlan)

Mazatlan is a coastal city on the Mexican mainland. In the afternoon, where they aren't stopped by high rises or cancelled by ever expanding parking lots and pavement, sea breezes cool the city. At least in the winter.  If it gets too hot, however, you can always hail one of the city's famous "pulmonias," "pneumonia cars," so called because they are doorless and windowless converted, canopied VW bugs. Most are tricked out with superb sound systems and all sorts of detailing on the dash and steering wheel. You can bomb through town, the wind in your hair, listening to the whatever music most pleases your driver, swerving around corners, hanging on so that you (and your luggage) aren't tossed from the side.

Here we drive along a mural painted by school children, past a tortilla factory and through several neighbourhoods enroute to the Tufesa bus station. Our driver, Mario, is a return economic exile from the US. He worked for many years in California, but now all of the jobs have dried up, so he's back, cobbling together a living as he can, like everyone else clambering into the middle class in Mexico. It's a heroic but not hopeless effort, unhelped by US and Canadian "security" measures, which figure Mexico and Mexicans as unreliable and dangerous.

But let's mention this: assault rifles are not legally bought and sold in Mexico, and the personal ownership and use of firearms is more highly regulated and more generally frowned upon than it is just north of the Rio Grande. Indeed, many Mexicans complain that lax US gun regulation has led to a flood of weapons across the border from the US into Mexico. Recently, activists in the infamous Ciudad Juarez (called "Murder City" by reporter Chuck Bowden) have posted a giant billboard, built of letters made from crushed firearms that reads "NO MORE WEAPONS!" According to reporter Claire Shaeffer-Duffy,  a study released in March 2013 by the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego and the Brazil-based Igarapé Institute "estimates that upward to a quarter million weapons purchased in the U.S. are smuggled into Mexico annually."  

Of course, the profitable trade in illegal weapons isn't the only thing contributing to violence in Mexico: poverty, corruption, extortion, the distortions created by the US appetite for and war on drugs, not to mention the ongoing failures of a largely inoperative investigative and legal system each contribute to the overall picture.

Still, it wasn't lost on us that the latest US mass killing, a rampage in Santa Barbara, happened during the twenty hours we were on the bus from Mazatlan to Phoenix. In fact, according to salon.com, there's a mass shooting in the US every five days, and by one count, also in the US, there were 11, 419 gun deaths in 2013. Is Mexico significantly more dangerous than the US? Really?

Let's be clear, and keep our eyes open. Mexico is certainly not without serious problems--the ever larger scope of the drug cartels and the lack of a working justice system are particularly notable--but to pretend that it's somehow especially rough, while the US isn't, or that we "other" North Americans aren't co-contributors to "Mexican violence" is just a big old lie.

Sources

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/05/the-exchange-charles-bowden-on-jurez-murder-city.html

You can also read my account of Chuck Bowden's terribly sad and sobering Murder City here: http://visiblepoetry.blogspot.ca/2011/05/reading-lists-of-dead-poetry-and-social.html

http://ncronline.org/news/global/blame-mexico-gun-violence-crosses-us-border

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/12/29/Mexican-government-19736

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/california-shootings-victims-all-uc-santa-barbara-students-1.2653517

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/25/fight_the_nra_28117_gun_deaths_since_sandy_hook_must_be_remembered/

http://guns.periscopic.com/?year=2013

Snapshots

Marina Seca, San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico

1. The wash filled with red earth, spots of mud, standing water.  Swallows flit across the road, a gull flaps by, then suddenly, along the line of trees, a commotion.  An egret lands; the other birds scatter then return while it highsteps happily in the rocky ditch.

 

2. I am on the way to the market.  A bright grey knee-high dog with large ears comes scampering up the road and sniffs my heels. Two women in a golf cart stop to pet it.  One stumps out handling two canes, the dog backs off, then runs forward: he knows her.

3. Water gushes beneath the road, still tumbling out of the mountains after the rains two days ago.  This is where the road washed out in the fall after the hurricane, and an entire work gang is still labouring to replace it.  They've built themselves a tarpaper shack just off of the road; all day they move machinery and screen earth, separating out the stones.  Trucks full of pipes discharge their loads here; a woman waits for the bus; two boys dig what looks like--but cannot be--a shallow grave with pickaxes.  Someone has just planted palms in the median; abrupt holes in the earth--pedestrian beware!--indicate where other plantings may be.  I come from the market and carry heavy bags.  I pick my way through the uneven ground of the median until I arrive at a culvert.  Water is gushing from a cast iron pipe, creating a small red mud lake.  A young engineer balances on the pipe, talking on his cellphone.  He gestures to someone else, then suddenly looses his balance, teeters, his eyes wide as he peers into the watery mud.  He flails his arms, regains his balance, shrugs, then snaps his phone closed and pulls out a tape measure to count off the length of broken pipe.

4. It is night. Cold, clear, the sky filled with stars. There, above the yard, is the big dipper, its handle tipped back along a mast so that the ladle dumps out backwards, pouring starlight over the deck.

5.  It's dusk.  The cattle wander up from the arroyo, where they've been feeding on grass and sheltering in the trees. They decide to cross the road and nothing will hurry them, not the baying of the dogs nor the honking chorus of a line of dusty pick-up trucks, tired men on their way home from work.